The City of Whittlesea, in Melbourne’s outer north, is striking success with a SharePoint strategy for document management. According to Whittlesea’s Information Management Coordinator, Mary Ann Rosenthal, SharePoint is also helping break down the outdated ‘silo mentality’ and fostering collaboration across the organisation.

The City of Whittlesea first considered moving to electronic document management in the late 1990s. However the introduction of an EDRMS platform was abandoned in 2006 as it became obvious it was too costly and labour-intensive to implement.

The council was then left with the challenge of implementing a new document management platform. Like many organisations with a corporate Office license, SharePoint was the obvious solution.

“After a year working with Windows SharePoint Service (WSS), which is included with Windows Server, our achievements were such that we decided to purchase the full copy of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007,” said Rosenthal.

At the same time, Whittlesea took the opportunity to broaden the focus of what had become a very narrow system-based project to include the human aspect of the change required. This resulted in the Information Management Program, which is now underway.

This program aims to instill good information management practice among staff as SharePoint is deployed across the organisation. Its primary intent is to help people to work better. Specifically, it aims to maintain or improve productivity while establishing a clean and disciplined information management environment.

“Some business areas are using SharePoint more extensively than others,” said Rosenthal. “One example is a program to manage local boarding houses that involves both the building services and the health services departments at council.

“Previously they would have to send Excel spreadsheets back and forth, whereas now they can each update separate fields in SharePoint. Our marketing and communications unit is also able to access this site for reporting to our CEO. SharePoint is breaking down the silo mentality and introducing real collaboration between separate business units.”

Resolving information management issues

Council staff are always under pressure to deal with ever higher volumes of transactions and associated information. One of the key considerations in acquiring SharePoint was providing staff with facilities to help them better manage problem areas, as a trade-off for better managing their information.

SharePoint’s extensive out-of-the-box functionality allows rapid development of solutions that form the starting points for the organisation’s various departments on their journey into a more formalised information management environment.

At the City of Whittlesea this has begun to deliver:
* Team management sites for units in the Health area;
* A corporate image library;
* A governance portal containing a wide range of compliance, decision-making and reference information;
Birth and medical documentation for the Maternal and Child Health unit; and
* An online library of engineering plans.

“Our early attempts at implementing an electronic document management system taught us an awful lot about the way the organisation uses information,” said Rosenthal. “We didn’t just buy a system and plug it in. We realised it’s really all about culture. You can have a whizz-bang multimillion dollar set up, but if your staff don’t want to manage information well, it won’t happen.

“The information management team has been working on what we call the ‘Good Practice Project’, which involves cleaning up the network drive, archiving electronically and running awareness sessions. We are in people’s faces all the time. Every member of my team knows just about everybody in council. People are now ringing us about information management issues, which is really good.”

Improvement, not duplication

“Like any Council, our major business is planning and building applications. Whittlesea is still in the process of implementing electronic workflow. At present plans and applications can be submitted electronically, however these are then printed out and kept on a paper file.

“We are actually looking at process, which takes a lot longer than just implementing an electronic document library. Rather than just duplicate what is happening with paper, we want to improve the process,” said Rosenthal.

Some electronic processes in prototype include food sampling, freedom of information, junior sport and cultural grant applications. These areas represent a step up for Whittlesea in terms of their level of sophistication. They include the use of InfoPath to create online forms that replace existing paper forms. These online forms are captured as part of the set of digital process documentation.

Civica has announced integration of the local government ERP platform with SharePoint but this is yet to be delivered.

Whittlesea is looking to implement an electronic archive with the arrival of SharePoint 2010, and is exploring options to deliver VERS compliance in 2011.

As with any organisation, managing email is a real issue. Staff have two choices, print it out or save it to a separate drive in a structured area.

“It's about culture and risk management. We don’t expect staff to save every email, just when they record evidence of a transaction,” said Rosenthal. “With SharePoint 2010, it will be much simpler to get email into SharePoint. “