In a perfect enterprise, all data and content would be entirely integrated throughout all business apps, with workflow and business process management (BPM) systems driving most tasks. However, many of today's organisations are only beginning to make this transition. The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) is one Australian federal government agency that has taken firm strides in its quest to achieve this ideal.

ACIAR is a statutory authority established in 1982 that works with developing nations to fund research projects.

While being one of the smaller Australian federal agencies, with 55 staff based in Canberra and 25 overseas it faced the typical challenges of dealing with the traditional information silos. Critical information was locked away in a legacy EDRMS, Outlook, highly customised Lotus Notes databases, a SharePoint Intranet and personal devices, with limited reporting ability.

Mobility was also critical as approximately 16 ACIAR Canberra based staff members travel for up to 30% of the year to the countries ACIAR works in.

Joanna Hicks, ACIAR’s Manager, Business Systems Support, explains the many challenges that the agency faced in 2014.

“There was a dislocation between corporate, research, Canberra and overseas staff around access to information, internal communication and collaboration. The duplication of information with multiple sources of truth also made on-boarding new staff difficult.

“Our organisational and system knowledge was held by a few key staff, who also had the responsibility for reporting and administration support. This presented a risk to the agency.”

“There was also pressure on a very small IT department which had to support growing agency requirements to maintain modern and secure systems and better manage information,” said Hicks.

Having a mix of digital and paper based processes means many agencies are on the back foot in relation to the Government's Digital Continuity 2020 policy. While ACIAR still has some legacy processes in 2016 that require a step where documents are printed and handled manually, for instance in finance processing and contract management, it is working steadily towards a future where all documents created digitally are managed digitally.

Having worked with SharePoint since the 2010 edition, when it was chosen to provide the organisation with an intranet, ACIAR elected to put all its eggs in one basket and standardise on SharePoint 2013 as an information management platform.

Over 2015-2016 the organisation migrated email to Office365 and content from its legacy EDRMS (Meridio) and Lotus Notes to a Cloud as a Service (CaaS) deployment of SharePoint 2013 provided by Dimension Data.

The migration from Lotus Notes was accomplished using a Dell migration tool that mapped fields from Notes to SharePoint, whereas the Meridio migration will be managed jointly by internal IT staff and external contractors. Some content will be moved to the active SharePoint site, some to a SharePoint archive and the rest stored in a duplicate fileplan on shared drives as an archive. All of the content will be searchable and accessible but will now be managed under National Archives of Australia (NAA) Administrative Functions Disposal Authority (ADFA) and the Research & Development General Records Authority (GRA).

Flexibility, Simplicity, Choice. These are among the biggest driving forces behind cloud computing. Just as we have come to expect to be able to watch movies or play games whenever we want online, cloud computing offers a way to tap into computing resources on demand: data, computing, applications and services.

It also relieves the limited resources of IT teams at small government agencies!

To duplicate the functions of its Meridio and Notes systems required the full utilisation of SharePoint 2013’s capabilities for designing workflows, templates, lists and libraries.

“This required that all ACIAR business processes be mapped, reviewed, signed off and documented,” said Hicks.

“Our SharePoint intranet was previously mostly ‘read only’ for the majority of ACIAR staff, but with the upgrade to SharePoint 2013 we wanted to introduce the ability for staff to collaborate on team sites and publishing pages on SharePoint.”

“This created one integrated, collaborative environment, accessible by the entire agency. Simultaneously we introduced OneDrive, OneNote, Skype for Business on top of the added functionality of SharePoint 2013.”

Having a single repository provides the elusive goal of a single source of truth with version control and interoperability. Some partner organisations and remote staff have been provided with external access to the EDRMS using SharePoint accounts via AD Premium, while others have limited access to documents via AvePoint Perimeter.

Future development includes additional solutions to assist with records management and email management in SharePoint.

“Staff are currently filing email manually into SharePoint, but much of our email traffic will be reduced over the next year or two by utilising SharePoint workflows,” said Hicks.

Other initiatives on the horizon include developing online templates and workflows for a range of internal corporate processes, improved external stakeholder engagement and knowledge sharing.

ACIAR is also looking to replace its on-premise PABX and outdated desk phones with a cloud-based communication system, utilising Skype for Business capability and mobile device integration.