SharePoint 2010 and TRIM have combined to form a winning team in major push to reduce paper use at Greater Shepparton City Council

The Victorian council's  Information Management Branch has been rewarded with recognition in Victoria’s 2011 Sir Rupert Hamer Records Management Awards.

Council's CEO Phil Pearce said the branch was awarded for improved processes and increased use of digital information.

"Staff have worked hard to roll out new processes and practices to the organisation and should be congratulated," Mr Pearce said.

"The team was required to demonstrate knowledge of legislation and how these can be applied in everyday our everyday work to improve business systems.

"Some of the other award winners were The Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission, Northern Health and Land Victoria, so it is very impressive to win one of these awards."

The Sir Rupert Hamer Records Management Awards recognise achievements in good records management practice within Victorian government Agencies and local Community Archives.

One of the largest regional councils in Victoria, Greater Shepparton City Council has had an electronic document management system (EDMS) for some time, but has been looking for ways to better utilise the system to improve and introduce consistent record-keeping practises across all functions of the Council.

One major issue that kept arising was that everyone wanted to physically sign documents. This meant that people were printing out copies of information in EDMS to sign, retaining the duplicated paper copy as the official record of council.  After months of research, it was discovered that paper records do not always need to be physically signed, and in fact using simple mechanics within the EDMS could introduce streamlined and consistent methods for managing records.

A Digital Consent model was developed by the records management team whereby a new process was implemented. Now, when a document needs to be executed, it is workflowed to the relevant General Manager in the EDMS. Once completed, the electronic document is provided to the CEO who then completes their part. This results in no hardcopies needing to be produced.

TRIM has been used to manage paper records at the council since 1998. It is currently utilised by around 500 of council’s 800 staff who work on the corporate network.

Rod Apostol, Manager of Information Systems, Information Management and GIS, said the Digital Consent model had evolved from the council’s push towards digital record-keeping.

“This is a spinoff of a major project we have undertaken in recent years to reduce the amount of hard copy being generated.

“TRIM had been relegated to record-keeping function and with all records stored on paper, we were running out of room.

“To stop paper generation we wanted the electronic copy to become the primary version and implement workflows in TRIM with all the authorisations valid in court.

“Once a resident sends in a complaint or a letter of concern, we have a CRM system to manage responses. We also wanted to develop the ability to also record a full audit trail showing the original letter and how we responded.”

Council is also back-scanning up to 80% of hard copy records. Large format scanners from HP are used to digitise plans and drawings submitted with development applications.

So that council staff can view documents as well as their enterprise applications, workstations have all been upgraded with dual 22” screen monitors for general staff and 30” models for those who need to view large format documents.

In addition to traditional correspondence, Shepparton City is taking steps to include social media in the digital record. Selected council groups will be communicating with ratepayers on Facebook, after which the entire conversation will be printed as a PDF and archived in TRIM as a  permanent record.

Adrian Perna, Team Leader Information Management at Greater Shepparton City Council, said, “We had to find out all the reasons why staff were printing a paper copy so we could address them.

“We have all these business systems in place for electronic information but people were always printing and we were having to manage those paper copies. So that was our first challenge.

“One of the main reasons that people gave was they needed a signature on a printed document. However with the changes to the Evidence Act 2008, if the document is placed in a TRIM workflow then that approval is satisfactory for a court.

“Another big reason given was that they needed to print a copy for the auditor. In fact, auditors actually prefer getting it electronically because we can also produce an audit trail around it. If we just give them a paper file than we don’t know who has altered it or when. In TRIM each time someone looks at it its gets stamped.”

“We stopped staff from printing emails when responding to a ratepayer, instead it is workflowed in TRIM. One of the problems was we were running hybrid systems but neither was up to date. Neither system had the full story. We needed to start filing everything in TRIM and stop filing hard copies.

“We have also set our email attachment size limits quite low to encourage users to store documents in TRIM. Staff can’t use their email folders as a de facto document store. We encourage them to store the email with the attachment in TRIM so they don’t lose the context.”

A change to the organisation’s culture has resulted in 70% of information that comes into council being scanned and checked into TRIM which starts a workflow. The hard copy original is destroyed after 90 days.
Field officers have been equipped with HP EliteBooks so that notes can be appended to the TRIM file. To make the TRIM interface more user-friendly Shepparton has removed unnecessary elements to simplify the screen and SharePoint 2010 is providing the intranet platform with a search interface.

“We have written custom fields in TRIM so when people are checking their documents in TRIM all they need to do is add a few extra metadata fields and the document also magically appears on the intranet. So people now go to SharePoint to search for stuff. We also took away all the fileshares on the network and gave people no other places to actually save documents,” said Apostol.

“The relationship between Information Management and Information Systems has been critical.

“Actually, we are having a difficult time differentiating what’s IS and what’s IM, they are different sides of the same coin nowadays. IS staff and IM staff are dealing with the same things. I can see the day when we will have the one branch just with different specialities.”

Shepparton City is a long term SharePoint site and originally partnered with Microsoft to put the platform in place. It has since developed its own in-house SharePoint expertise within its 6-strong IST department.

“Using the latest version of TRIM, the SharePoint integration was easy to achieve using a wizard-style interface. It works well and we are really pleased with it. It was not a hard implementation,” said Apostol.

TRIM has also been integrated with the ESRI Geographical Information System (GIS) so that an aerial view of a property is linked to all of the information held by council about the property itself, i.e. valuations, permits, DAs. It is also possible to interrogate TRIM to find any correspondence that has come from that property.

Information Systems
Land Information System - Pathway
Financials - Great Plains
EDRMS - HP TRIM
Asset Management - Confirm
CRM - Merit
HR/Payroll - Aurion
GIS - ESRI
Intranet - SharePoint 2010