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

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.

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.

Stephen Aguilera-Mendoza, Count Wealth

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."