How corporate Australia battles information overload

By David Braue, ZDNet Australia

26 June 2006 02:48 PM

Tags: storage area network, cms, government, european union, emc, jetstar, case study, cio

	Introduction
	Jetstar CIO Stephen Tame explains why information management is critical to the airline.
	Family Court of Australia Information management officer Paul Taylor recounts the overhaul of FCoA's paper-based records management system.
	Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority How Virginia Orr led the charge for a massive digital document and information repository.
	Count Wealth With profits well into the millions, IT lead Stephen Aguilera-Mendoza decided it was time for some (document) spring cleaning.
	MBF Online manager Michael Valaris on why content management is crucial to the success on any business.

Editor: Fran Foo
Copy Editor: Stephen Turner
Design: Melissa Siu

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."