Deloitte centres on knowledge
Deloitte centres on knowledge
A huge new account for Deloitte's Melbourne data centre led to a whole new quality-based KM system.
As a company which prides itself on being at the forefront of technology, Deloitte Consulting had to focus on quality rather than cost-saving when budgeting for growth in its Melbourne data centre.
The centre is used to house hundreds of outsourcing workers, particularly those that were brought in to service Telstra. The two companies signed a five-year agreement in March 2001 for Deloitte to manage Telstra's enterprise resource planning (ERP) application. The Telstra account covers Telstra's payroll application for 45,000 employees, as well as data warehousing, budgeting, financial and legal applications.”In the past, with our operations being a good deal smaller, we managed with Windows desktop tools,” said David Fothergill, a director at Deloitte Consulting. ”The numbers have increased to the order of 50 projects being live at any one time. That meant that with the numbers of people involved, we needed a system administrator, a backup system, and authorisation [procedures].”
Mr Fothergill said the centre's document management and collaboration system had to provide the workers with a scaleable solution that would ensure a consistent end product. The Telstra agreement carried a service level agreement, which necessitated a layer of abstraction to gauge the performance of the whole data centre.
”Our justification was never predicated on saving money,” he said. ”We wanted to maintain good control on our deliverables, like the documents for our clients. This became clear when we were to scale up to hundreds of employees. It was a quality-driven decision.”
The company selected the Livelink suite from Open Text in January, and completed its deployment in April. The system runs on a SQL Server database on servers running Windows NT, and will interface with a contract management tool from Primavera and the customer relationship management suite Siebel 7. Mr Fothergill said Deloitte had previously created a software module to perform most of the training of new workers via computer-based training, but that apart from a printed manual, ”that's where it began and ended” in terms of a system to support knowledge workers.
”We needed a system to manage the documentation we were managing on behalf of our clients,” he said. ”We were focused on getting good version control. As our teams sizes get larger, it will be harder to maintain control. [Our new system] needed some more sophistication than ones in the past, so that drove us to needing a document management system.”
While the initial funding for the centre came from the Telstra account, Deloitte intended to use it to provide services to a wide number of clients in the future to perform application development and maintenance functions, or to be a ”large factory for doing application management,” as Mr Fothergill put it.
The Livelink system also offered the Deloitte employees access through a standard Web-based interface, which Mr Fothergill said enabled teleworkers to log in from outside the main office. In addition to offices in Brisbane and Petone in New Zealand, Deloitte often has its experts work on client sites.
”Livelink allowed us to have people using the system within our physical data centre, but also to connect people in satellite projects or on other sites,” he said.Deloitte appointed a number of ”document administrators” in each workgroup, who were linked with the system administrators to form a chain of command that reinforces the usage of the Livelink system. These human-based processes were combined with digital workflow procedures to create a working system that Deloitte hopes will pass level 3 of the CMM (Capability Maturity Model) quality certification program.
The transition from the old system of using desktop productivity tools like Microsoft Office is not yet complete, but the company is close to finishing its backfile conversion task.
”We are still in the process of converting data from old Microsoft directories. We intend to make Livelink the repository, we will get all into Open Text,” said Mr Fothergill. ”We have what we need.”