How corporate Australia battles information overload

Despairing that your office is drowning in paper? Flummoxed by the flood of e-mails you deal with every day?

You're not alone. Despite years of optimistic prognostication, the paperless office is still far from common. Rather, the flood of paperwork that has long plagued corporate Australia continues to grow -- complemented, in recent years, by untold volumes of e-mail and faxes that must all be categorised and dutifully archived.

Indeed, we are storing more information, and more kinds of information, than ever before. Little wonder that shipments of hard drives into the market continue to go through the roof. In the fourth quarter of 2005 alone, market research firm IDC reports, global shipments of hard drives grew 54.6 percent year-on-year to reach 653 petabytes (653,000 terabytes).

A good proportion of that is ending up on corporate storage area networks (SANs), which have relieved many of the problems of earlier server-based storage but are now presenting their own issues for companies trying to stay on top of their information. Tighter corporate governance requirements, among other pressures, mean that companies not only need to be able to store their information, but have to retrieve it in an accurate and timely manner.

This requirement has spurred a flurry of technological enhancements designed to improve the management and flow of information throughout a business. At a basic level, enterprise content management systems are providing rich content indexing, publishing and workflow control that mirrors internal corporate approval processes.

Sophisticated electronic document and records management (EDRM) systems handle images of paper documents and encapsulate traditional recordkeeping discipline for management of paper files. E-mail archiving systems automatically clean up, classify, index and archive mountains of old messages from inboxes across the enterprise. And behind all this, increasingly intelligent storage systems use information lifecycle management (ILM) techniques to monitor the age and relevance of stored content, moving it to progressively slower but cheaper types of storage until it is deleted or backed up onto tape for archiving.

Thankfully, the combination of such technologies has provided an arsenal of tools to help companies get their information under control, but that doesn't mean the process is easy. Here, we offer the stories of five organisations that took different approaches to satisfying a common business requirement: to improve management of their essential corporate information.

At cut-price airline Jetstar, a comprehensive document information management has proved essential to providing regulatory support for the company's move into long-haul international services later this year. The Family Court of Australia has used a growing document management implementation to improve its customer service in fulfilment of a strategic mandate from government auditors.

The Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority used an information management system to improve storage, versioning and distribution of both conventional documents and large-scale geographical plans, CAD files, and other types of information. We catch up with Count Wealth Accountants, which moved into new offices, declared them virtually paper-free -- and has stuck with it.

And, finally, at MBF, the challenge lay in getting better control over intranet and Web content for which, with fully 30 percent of new business coming through online channels, accuracy has taken on a new urgency.

As with most new applications, information management systems -- whether handling paper document images, e-mails or other types of information -- require a concerted effort on everyone's part to succeed. That includes executive buy-in, careful analysis of business requirements, regular user liaison, functional reviews and, perhaps most importantly, the willingness to continue pushing for positive change in the face of inevitable scepticism.

If nothing else, after all, information management systems are all about change -- and it's hardly news that many people don't handle change well. However, it is worth noting the one common theme that wends its way through all of these case studies: little wins breed big victories. Not every company here saw users clamouring to adopt their systems, and many are still working through the process of increasing end-user buy-in. However, giving users the right tools -- and helping them make the most of them -- has paid off in every instance.

The result: smoother, more efficient businesses that are well positioned to keep up with an ever-growing flood of business information. By taking control of that information once and for all, the focus shifts from just keeping up, to using that information to work smarter, better, and more accurately. And that, when it comes down to it, is both the promise and the potential of information management.

Jetstar: Information management for the long haul

Just two years after it elbowed its way into the discount airline market, Jetstar Airways recently celebrated the carriage of its one-millionth passenger and will soon begin flying long-haul trips to various international destinations. It's exciting times for the company, but one that has forced it into a period of IT introspection to make sure its information management infrastructure is up to the task.

As a new company, Jetstar initially found itself in the enviable position of being able to choose its own technological direction with no legacy data to worry about. In keeping with the company's overall mantra of cost-effective investments, however, a minimalist approach saw investments approved on a case-by-case basis with fully manual processes as the benchmark -- and, often, the result.

For the past two years, many of those processes have remained largely manually driven. For example, Jetstar has broken with rival Virgin Blue and parent Qantas to check passengers manually onto the plane; a series of numbered paper tickets, rather than boarding pass scanning systems, is used to ensure the right number of people are onboard.

-Everything we do is focused on managing the business as usual, and any other activity needs to be funded, costed and built individually," says Jetstar CIO Stephen Tame. -A lot of our systems are premised on the idea that if we needed an airport to go totally manual and run on paper, we could do that."

Manual processes have also predominated in the maintenance of crew records -- folders that maintain personal and professional details about the airline's 1,200 domestic staff. Within those books, critical information such as training experience and individual skills certifications is readily available -- but requires someone to manually search through what is often 30 pages or more to find the necessary document.

This meant that regular audits and information requests by CASA (Civil Aviation Safety Authority) could be quite burdensome. So, too, was the ongoing process of checking and updating the information in the books. -With most of the information we had, we thought about process," says Tame. -A staff member would fill in a [skills] test, someone signed it, then faxed it across so it could be filed into their book. We had paper on one end generating paper on the other end."

Flying away from paper
In a stopgap measure, Jetstar adopted Telstra's FaxStream FaxBank service, which allows incoming faxes to be digitised and managed electronically via e-mail -- although printed versions were still added to employees' books.

Burdensome as it was, careful attention to process had kept the system working relatively smoothly. However, it soon became clear that the company's move into long-haul flights was going to vastly increase the burden of manual processing: an additional 1,500 employees are expected to have joined the company by the time its first long-haul services kick off in November.

Jetstar recently began exploring options for streamlining the management of that information. Investigations led the company to Tower Software's TRIM document management system, which is now being implemented across the company.

The business case for the TRIM system was built on its ability to consolidate and improve management of four key types of information. The first was the crew books, which have been entered into TRIM through a massive scanning process that will allow those critical records to be accessed easily by employees and auditors.

Next to move to TRIM were the company's invoices and other financial operational data, which were recently added to the system to smooth the flow of relevant reports and information throughout the company. Although most organisations would approach the integration of financial systems with a system like TRIM by writing complex integration routines, Jetstar has opted for an easier, less painful and far more intuitive method of moving data around: e-mail.

In the company's new workflow environment, incoming invoices are scanned into TRIM, then vetted by Accounts Payable staff and e-mailed within a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to the appropriate person for approval. That person opens the Excel spreadsheet, checks the relevant document image in TRIM, then enters a code to indicate what expense account they want to post the charge to. That spreadsheet is e-mailed back to Accounts Payable, where the relevant information is keyed into the company's accounting system.

-We've got TRIM and systems that we've developed supporting the accounting process to the point of generating what needs to be filled in," says Tame, -but we don't need to have it 100 percent integrated into the accounting or ERP system. It's in that integration that most of these projects fail. A purist might question how we're bringing two systems together [without integrating them], but we're not purists -- we're realists."

To make the transition even easier, Jetstar hasn't migrated any of its old financial data into TRIM. The ease of that migration will speed the company's progress towards the next phase of the implementation: scanning of more than 4,000 customer service files. Each of these files involves large volumes of paper as customer service staff manage complaint letters, requests for special consideration, lost baggage claims, and other correspondence with the company's customers.

Also due to be incorporated into the system are human resources records -- resumes, employment records, occupational health and safety reports, medical reports, and other information. -All of these are generally documents that have to be sourced, filed, processed and reviewed by the company," says Tame. -They're a prime candidate for TRIM."

More passengers, same staff
As Jetstar begins selling tickets for its long-haul services, it will begin a process of rapid growth that will bring the effectiveness of the information management system to the fore.

With key business information stored on TRIM and readily accessible to the 25 or so users that need it regularly, Tame is confident that the system and associated processes will allow the company's administrative employees to handle the increase in customers without needing to bolster their numbers.

-If passenger numbers increase by 100 percent, complaints will probably increase by 100 percent too," says Tame. -By putting in the document management system, we're giving our staff the tools to cope with that. The three people in our Accounts Payable department, who process domestic volumes at the moment, could also process the volumes associated with international services without having to increase their headcount."

One of the nicer benefits of this is improved IT efficiency: as revenues increase but IT expenditure stays the same, Tame expects the company's IT expenditure will drop from its current 1.4 percent of revenues to just 1 percent (its startup IT costs were 1.6 percent of revenue). With an industry benchmark of around 3.5 percent and 1.6 percent for budget airlines, that projection represents budget that can be freed up for expansion in other parts of the business.

The key to successfully streamlining the business in this way, says Tame, is designing business processes appropriately.

-You need to review your business process and look at how electronic document management is going to work within that process," he explains. -Once you've done that and run the departments through it, you generally find extremely positive outcomes. Then we work with the business to work out what rules they want, deliver it to them, they agree and off we go."

Family Court of Australia gets Objective customer view

When Australia's peak family law court needed to improve its customer management, it turned to an electronic document management system that is supporting its push for best-practice compliance. David Braue explains.

update You can lead employees to a deep well of information, but can you make them drink from it? Not necessarily, as the Family Court of Australia (FCoA) has found since it moved from a conventional paper-based records management environment to an electronic document management system that has been expanding its reach across the organisation.

For years, FCoA had used recordkeeping software to keep track of the location of archived paper records pertaining to the thousands of divorce, child custody and other family separation-related cases it handles every year. Recognising that its information management requirements were rapidly expanding and included new types of data, the FCoA shifted more than 13,000 records and 47 types of file from the old system onto an enterprise content management platform from Objective.

Although that migration was the impetus for change, it was only the beginning of an ongoing transformation that has eased FCoA into an electronic records and document management environment that has become increasingly well utilised in intervening years.

-When we moved over to Objective, it made it much easier to understand how our information was going to look in the future," says Paul Taylor, information management officer with FCoA. -Now, the scope has increased and we're looking for that organisational change that will really push things forward much more uniformly. We've got ad hoc usage of different systems in various areas, and I'll always be looking at the value of bringing other people onto the project in various guises."

Better client management
The need for tighter corporate governance and accountability have reinforced the importance of the Objective system -- particularly in the wake of a 2004 Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) audit that highlighted untimely delivery and inconsistencies in the way the FCoA provided service to its customers.

ANAO recommended the FCoA review its electronic systems to improve complaint tracking and reporting. It also recommended the organisation consider ways to ensure consistent customer service and to support a feedback loop designed to make it (FCoA) more responsive to customer perceptions of its services.

The Objective system, which acts as the back-end for FCoA's Client Feedback Management System (CFMS) -- would provide a common repository for all kinds of customer service-related information and help the FCoA bring its complaints handling mechanism in line with the best-practice guidelines in the Australian Standards for Complaints Handling (AS4269-1995).

For five years, lodgements to the client feedback management system had been handled using an internally built Lotus Notes database that was initially delivered as a bespoke system. Over time, however, changes to the system had become expensive and difficult, performance had been slowing down as the system grew, and a lack of overall controls meant much of the client feedback just wasn't being handled optimally.

-We had around 300 pieces of client correspondence going onto the old system per year, but we knew we were getting more than that and had problems getting them into the system," explains Meg Foreman, client feedback coordinator with the FCoA.

-People were dealing with the correspondence manually, letters went unanswered. Everything was being done in a very separate fashion, and there was no knowledge across registries as to what was being done in different areas. It was not easy to get a consolidated view of issues raised across FCoA, nor of the responses provided to clients. In order to be able to consistently handle the correspondence we were getting from clients, we required something that a number of people could log onto nationally."

Moving the data into Objective has dramatically improved the situation -- allowing users to maintain a single version of the truth that is accessible by authorised employees and offers full versioning, archiving and other features that have improved tracking of customer correspondence.

Getting there wasn't easy, however: pushing the system through the ranks of users has taken a concerted effort combining extensive advocacy, user education and the involvement of appropriately constructed working parties.

A series of executive guides, outlining the technology and its benefits, were produced for stakeholders across the organisation. Careful monitoring of system usage allows problems in client feedback management to be identified and users approached for follow-up -- a process that Foreman believes has improved overall data quality and engendered confidence amongst FCoA users.

The long-term goal of the project is to get CFMS users to take responsibility for driving their own business process improvements. Despite efforts to promote uptake of the system, however, the biggest impetus for change has been users' own initiative -- confirming the importance of a -pull" rather than a -push" approach.

-It was initially a bit of an uphill struggle, and when people don't see the benefit of a system at first, you have to push them," says Foreman. -In the end, what's happening is that the registry staff are realising the benefits of having all this information electronically, they're wanting to do more and we have to drive them less."

The hard sell
Although the Objective system has gradually been winning converts, the migration process has been an ongoing effort: FCoA has many different types of data under management and some would not be considered for migration for specific reasons. One example is the actual case-related information stored within the court's in-house Casetrack system since it stores data about applications filed with the Court, and supports the case management of those matters through to determination of items such as listings and court events.

That's left Taylor and his team serving as advocates for Objective, educating individual information owners about its benefits. -I keep my ear to the ground and try to see if there are areas where they're doing a new project and looking at an issue," he says. -We propose ideas about how we can be a solutions provider rather than a traditional you-must-do-this kind of area like records management has traditionally been."

The more problematic current processes are, the harder it is to sell the Objective system: -It depends on how sophisticated your users are at the moment," Taylor explains. -If you're coming from a point of view where there are no document naming conventions, no rules around where people put things, and no e-mail inbox limitations -- in other words, if people have no rules around their information -- it becomes harder to come in and say 'we're bringing in this system where there will be rules'."

Some business owners have been more than willing to move specific databases onto Objective and its Oracle back-end database. Others, however, have been concerned about data ownership and proved reluctant to embrace what are seen as arbitrarily complex requirements for document management -- regardless of the long-term benefits they may deliver.

Ultimately, many users only accept the system's benefits when they see those benefits for themselves. That inevitable truth has made Taylor confident that other recalcitrant users will continue to come around and embrace the efficiencies of the new system -- but he admits it will take time.

"Many times, [business owners] say 'we don't know whether we want to do that' but six months down the track they come back and say 'do you remember that thing we were talking about?' It's a matter of being patient."

Paperless office a safe harbour on Sydney foreshore

Filing your working documents electronically can really make your company shine for the auditors -- but getting employees onboard can be another thing altogether, as the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority found.

It's one thing to say that the organisation needs to move away from a dependence on paper, and another thing entirely to make that move into reality. Just ask Virginia Orr, who has spent much of the last six years helping the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority (SHFA) wean its employees off of paper files onto a massive digital document and information repository.

SHFA is a state government agency charged with managing the development of The Rocks and Darling Harbour precincts within Sydney's CBD. With so many historic and publicly used buildings within its range of responsibility, the organisation's 250 employees handle a broad range of documentation including planning approvals, marketing designs, graphical illustrations, CAD files, Word documents, and many other types of information.

Because of the depth of paper information it was managing, the SHFA was an early advocate of electronic document and records management and back in 2000 implemented its core electronic system, Avand DataWorks, to handle structured recordkeeping of its many paper files.

Convinced that funnelling paper and electronic documents into the system would provide even more value, the organisation eventually laid down plans to streamline business processes by digitising all incoming paper correspondence. The reaction, however, was hardly what technical staff expected: -it went down like a lead balloon," says Orr.

The problem: most of the organisation's work processes were based around paper, and simply expecting people to give that up proved to be overly optimistic. It's a problem that isn't overcome easily -- but SHFA is hardly the first organisation to encounter such issues.

-As time has gone on, we've looked at what other organisations are doing and have found everyone has had pretty much the same problem getting rid of hard copy," Orr explains. -When we first put the system in, we focused on getting people to put the information into it -- but we didn't focus enough on telling them 'the reason you're putting it in is to get it out later'. People thought that DataWorks just meant more work for them."

Slow and steady
Years down the track, the DataWorks environment has become endemic to the way SHFA functions. And while paper still abounds at the organisation's offices, extensive user consultation and training has gradually helped deliver the online information management environment that Orr and her peers envisioned all those years ago.

The key to success, Orr explains, has been to focus on both facilitating the entry of documents into DataWorks -- much of the metadata is automatically generated -- and, more importantly, convincing employees that the system is providing benefits for them.

-It's the kind of system that needs to build some critical mass," Orr explains. -You need to get to the level where if you're looking for something and run a search, you know you're going to get something back. If people are searching and can't find what they want, they're not going to use the system."

It was only in mid 2004 that the organisation actually began scanning all incoming correspondence. This effort -got the ball rolling", Orr says, and began populating the database with useful information. At the same time, employees were being evangelised to in order to encourage them to participate.

One major selling point was the security provided by a digital copy: once a document is stored in DataWorks, it cannot get lost -- a point that was not wasted on employees who spent more than their fair share of time chasing down files. Paper files were also less secure than their digital counterparts, which can be protected using passwords and encryption.

Ultimately, a compromise was reached: employees that wanted to work with paper files could do so, as long as they also put a version of the documents into DataWorks. Paper files are named using the same subject indexing conventions as the digital system, and are managed using normal recordkeeping rules right until the time they're scheduled for destruction.

-Some people still prefer to work with paper, but we say 'just put it all in Dataworks and if you want to keep a paper file that's fine,'" says Orr. -If they want to do both, that's a duplication of effort -- but at least when it's in the system, it's protected and named meaningfully. You can't just put something in there; you have to link it to at least two indexes and give it a description."

Because DataWorks also captures electronic documents, the system has enjoyed strong take-up amongst employees that have increasingly warmed to its value. In March alone, for example, the system's database grew by 1,829 new Word documents and expanded its database with 146,000 e-mails (including 92,700 incoming messages). All told, the database occupies more than two terabytes of a 4TB EMC Centera-driven storage area network (SAN).

Making the grade
With the DataWorks environment now well established, SHFA is now using regular reporting to improve the visibility of employees' data management activities.

A set of regularly reviewed key performance indicators (KPIs) allows trending over time by tracking metrics such as the number of documents registered in the system; which business units are using the system the most and least; the number of users in the system per month; the number of people being trained; and the speed with which DataWorks is delivering search results. Those results are also graded for relevance by users, who are prompted with each search to click on a radio button to indicate how relevant the results were.

SHFA's information management efforts have been driven by much more than just a passing interest in efficiency, however. -Being a government agency, we have a lot of legislated requirements," says Orr. -We're audited both internally and externally on our recordkeeping and procedures, and the standards we are required to achieve are quite rigorous compared to those for a private organisation."

Those regular audits were another motivator for SHFA to spread enthusiasm about the new system, and the ongoing metrics helped Orr's team get a clear picture of what was working in the new system and what wasn't.

This analysis was backed by a major business process mapping exercise, which identified key business processes and dependencies between them so the group could revisit the information systems and manual systems supporting them. With those processes clarified, the organisation could focus on tailoring the system to both complement and improve the workers' everyday activities.

In the end, initial worker apprehension about DataWorks has gradually dissipated as it became clear that the electronic information management system is just a natural progression for the employees.

-People always had the responsibility for managing corporate records and making sure they were captured right," says Orr, -but we had no way to know whether they were doing it or not -- until someone lodged a [Freedom of Information request] and we couldn't find the file. I'm sure we suffered as a result of that: a lot of information must have been walking out the door and been lost, but now we have a way of keeping an eye on it."

The system cost SHFA around $150,000 and slightly more for the SAN. Despite its inauspicious beginnings, the agency's concerted efforts to increase user buy-in have paid off -- both in terms of easier access to important documents, and in improving SHFA's compliance with regulatory requirements.

Later this year, that compliance will be further strengthened through the establishment of a secondary disaster recovery site. Regular additions to SHFA's SAN ensure there is enough headroom to cope with expected growth, while backups to WORM (write once read many) optical disks ensures that SHFA has accurate, non-repudiable copies of its information.

It's all part of an organisational transformation that has successfully navigated SHFA from the world of paper to a heavily digitised information management environment. The success of the project was recently confirmed when the organisation scored a four out of five on its last compliance audit -- a result of which Orr is suitably proud.

-We keep quite detailed records and have discovered from that that we're getting less and less hard copies," she says. -We still have the legacy of all these [hard copies] that we manage, but everything goes into the system as well."

-It's really been about achieving efficiencies and making sure that we're demonstrating best practice. We don't force people to use it; people can create documents somewhere else -- but we just let them know that we hope they don't. One way or another, as long as the information is in DataWorks, the system is working."

Going paperless pays off for Count Wealth

With its workers scattered across several floors and hundreds of thousands of filed pages cramping its office, Count Wealth Accountants decided it was time for a spring clean -- and a paperless office. David Braue explains how the vision became reality.

Every company has considered the benefits of a paperless office at one time or another, but a fortuitously timed office move gave Count Wealth Accountants the chance to put its dreams into action with a document spring clean and digitisation project that has vastly improved its business.

The cleanout came after the company, which manages around 470 accountancy franchises nationwide, realised that over 20 years of organic growth had left its business in a state of disarray. Around 95 workers were spread across several floors of an office building, with redundant facilities and unused office space keeping overhead costs undesirably high. Adding to the clutter were more than 600,000 pages of client-related documents, many pertaining to past franchisees that were no longer part of the Count Wealth network.

Combining its operations into one floor would clearly reduce overheads, but even bigger things came onto the radar screen after the company decided to take the opportunity to introduce a completely electronic workflow.

Momentum for the change had been slowly building for years, but with an increasing volume of e-mails adding to the deluge of information, it was clear that a consolidated document management infrastructure would significantly improve its overall information management.

-We thought there was no better opportunity for us to look at getting rid of some of our historical paper, and also to improve our processes moving forward," says Stephen Aguilera-Mendoza, senior executive for IT and data solutions with Count Wealth.

-We were dealing with largely soft documents, and most of our dealings occur via e-mail and never get converted into paper. We're a medium sized business, so we didn't need the sort of document management a large company would use -- but we also knew we needed something more powerful than just whacking the system onto the network and hoping people would use it."

A careful evaluation of available document management solutions led Count Wealth to local company Redmap Networks, whose ManagePoint, CaptureEzy and CaptureMail would work together to provide a document scanning, e-mail archiving and information management system.

Travelling light
To make sure the document management initiative didn't lose momentum, Count Wealth took an unusual step: it chose a new office that was big enough for its people, but small enough that it physically couldn't accommodate the volume of past documents the company had accumulated.

-We wanted to avoid a situation where we just put everything we had into a document management system, which would effectively create the same amount of clutter online as the paper we had," says Aguilera-Mendoza.

-We put our backs against the wall and forced ourselves into it by moving to a smaller space. It's almost like buying a size eight pair of jeans and squeezing yourself into it [as motivation to lose weight]. What little filing space the new building has is at the basement level, 19 floors down from our office."

Over a period of nearly three weeks, employees spent lunchtimes and weekends mercilessly hacking the deadwood out of long-outdated files. Incidental documents with no lasting value, or those that were well past regulatory document retention limits, were disposed of. By the end of the exercise, more than 400,000 pages had been taken out of circulation, leaving the company with approximately 170,000 pages to move into the Redmap environment.

Getting those documents into the system was one of the last activities that Count Wealth undertook before leaving its old offices. Over a fortnight just before Christmas 2004, the company rented an industrial-strength scanner and brought on temporary staff that scanned the pages, 18 hours a day. It was a pressing project, but in the end the effort was worth it: Count Wealth had a streamlined, digital repository containing all the relevant information it needed to keep from its once-exploding paper files.

Counting the benefits
Count Wealth moved into its new offices in January 2005, and the Redmap system has since become an intrinsic part of the company's business processes. What little paper documents still come into the company are entered into the system, while around 5,000 to 10,000 incoming and outgoing e-mails are sorted and archived every week. Automatic duplication of attachments, and removal of spam e-mails, keeps data volumes as small as possible.

To facilitate easy retrieval of content stored in the system, during the implementation Count Wealth and Redmap conducted a content review designed to optimise retrieval of information by employees. This has been possible through the use of four specific ManagePoint indexes: member name, member code, document type and document date. Every document is classified according to these criteria, so by searching on these indexes, users can quickly locate the document they need. A full-text search can also be run, if necessary, to more comprehensively search through the company's entire data store.

Compared with the previous glut of paper, the new system has been a significant improvement in terms of both employee productivity and cost savings. Paper and electronic documents are available instantly, and the electronic repository allows the company to meet regulatory and governance requirements without having to manage a torrent of paper.

-It's fairly easy to install a piece of software, but it's harder to understand how you use it in the business," says Aguilera-Mendoza. -At a global level there has been considerable buy-in, but on an individual by individual basis it's been an ongoing exercise. It's really when you put these things in employees' hands and they start to use them on a day-to-day basis that they start to see the benefits. Often, they have knock-on benefits to other areas that I wasn't necessarily conscious of, because I'm not doing their job every day."

Money, meet mouth
Continued success in Count Wealth's electronic office has required constant attention to ongoing user education and evangelising -- and some carefully considered hardware purchases.

A major part of this effort is training users not to print documents -- and giving them alternatives. For example, the company has provided many users with large monitors, or dual monitors in some cases, so they can read documents onscreen at a comfortable size without printing them. In addition, staff incentives reward process efficiency and elimination of paper.

-We went through the process of questioning people every time they went to hit the Print button," says Aguilera-Mendoza. -We've backed up our rhetoric with investment in those areas so people realise we are serious about making sure paper wasn't unnecessarily generated in the office. Often when you talk to staff about intangible benefits, they tend to look the other way, but we got around that by setting specific objectives and rewarding staff appropriately."

Since its implementation, the system has been such a boon that Count Wealth, which provides both administrative and consulting support to its franchisees, has been handling enquiries from many franchisees interested in replicating the company's paperless office in their own environment. So far, its advocacy has seen more than 30 clients adopt similar technology. In this way, Count Wealth is gradually growing its paperless office into a massive electronic network for information exchange and management.

The success of the document management project has vindicated Count Wealth's aggressive culling of its paper files, and has meant there is still ample breathing room in the company's new offices. Yet despite the benefits realised so far, Aguilera-Mendoza is careful to point out that the change process remains an ongoing effort.

-We're only halfway down the track in terms of seeing the potential benefits," he explains. -There are teams that don't use the system, and many never will. But the teams involved early in the process have since found newer and better ways to use the system to their advantage. It's like anything: as the team gets more familiar with it, understands how it works and feels more natural to use it, they look for ways to use it better and to improve it."

MBF invests in content insurance

Corporate Web sites are big business, but they can be a big headache if they're not managed correctly. Insurance company MBF has found significant relief from a new content management system that has smoothed the movement of content to internal and external Web sites. David Braue explains how.

It wasn't too long ago that corporate Web sites were mainly static advertisements that reinforced a company's brand but provided little outward value to consumers.

Those days, however, are well and truly over for companies like health, life and travel insurance provider MBF, which has seen its online site become an increasingly important channel for customer contacts and information dissemination. The company's site receives around 80,000 unique visitors monthly and more than one million visitors annually, and is now credited with handling 30 percent of MBF's new sales.

Befitting the site's increased profile, MBF has over the past 18 months been working to implement a more structured, efficient mechanism for the production and updating of its online content.

The project, which centres around a far-reaching implementation of the Vignette content management system (CMS), sees content managed by a five-person team that handles both the publishing of information online, and liaises with the various business units responsible for the content and approval of online materials.

MBF's content team has been intimately involved with the Vignette implementation and customisations that link the online content with other parts of the company's business processes. That has positioned the system as a key driver for growth at MBF, for which Web site features such as interactive quotes are an easy way of informing customers and capturing potential new leads.

-We're using Vignette from a content perspective, to capture [sales] leads and pass that through to an application process that will then be used to convert those to actionable information," says Michael Valaris, online sales manager for the e-business team at MBF. -The Web site is one of our three main sales channels."

Better content control The incentive for the move to Vignette came after content producers ran into ongoing problems with the previous environment. To work around deficiencies in the system, content was often being copied from the CMS and pasted into separate Web design software to tailor it to design requirements and workflow processes.

MBF recognised that it needed a new platform that would combine robust content versioning, distribution and workflow with full-featured production capabilities. With its new CMS in place, MBF has been able to improve management of content on both its Web site and intranet, which has been positioned as a frequently updated repository of corporate knowledge.

The company's content engineers maintain around 500 different content objects, although these are mixed and matched into around 2,000 different pages - confirming the value of reusable objects within an online environment based on the need for accurate information.

Rather than having to maintain concurrency between objects in different parts of the business, the object-oriented approach allows the content designers to maintain each element just once -- and then mix and match them as necessary. That capability is essential given the detailed legal specifics of much of the online content, which involves detailed policy documents and guidelines.

-Being able to update one document that affects the site in many areas at the one time is an obvious advantage not only in terms of turnaround, but also from the legal perspective," says Valaris. -If there are any discrepancies, we need to push [updates] out as soon as possible. Being able to version is a big advantage, as is being able to roll back content through releases and process it again."

Building a new workflow MBF's single-source content structure has significantly improved the company's ability to ensure accuracy, and demonstrate its content governance.

Meeting those requirements has also been easier by using the system to revise and finalise content by the system's 20-odd users spread through select business units.

Although the Vignette workflow engine is still being gradually implemented, direct access to in-production content allowed legal representatives to access that information and make any changes necessary for signoff -- a review that is essential for every piece of content put online. Because the Web site carries legal weight, accuracy is particularly important when changes are made -- as in the company's annual Regulatory Review, when the pricing and makeup of every single product is reviewed and associated online information is updated.

Centralised content approval is a major improvement over the previous system, which was fragmented and difficult to manage, but having the content and approvals available throughout the organisation has freed up those logjams and sped the process of developing, publishing and revising content.

-The growth in the amount of content we were putting onto the site had increased dramatically," says Tony Nguyen, e-business manager with MBF. -Everyone wants to get a system that would be more centrally focused."

-While content was always controlled centrally in the past, this system has allowed us to keep that control as well as distribute that information. We have a broader workflow system so everyone is able to sign off on the content and bring it to the market as quickly as possible. Taking the opportunity to identify the internal signoff processes correctly was critical to moving the business forward."

With both the intranet and Web site now well and truly established in the new system, payback has been measured in several ways. Licensing fees in the new environment are lower, but the biggest benefit has come from -efficiency with content," says Nguyen. This efficiency stems from the redesigned information architecture, its extensibility to other types of information, and the improvements in process control that the system has delivered.

MBF is now working to strengthen its workflow capabilities, and tighten back-end links between the CMS and other systems across the organisation. -A lot of our functionality is through J2EE, and we have a lot of code that will allow us to capture data [from other systems] and run through" into the CMS, says Valaris. As these capabilities progressively come online, the system's profile as a key custodian of MBF's corporate knowledge will continue to grow.