The journey to improve and consolidate information management

In a recent discussion at Collaborate 2021, Robert Peacock, ICT Manager at Infrastructure NSW, spoke with James Hickey, Account Manager at Objective, to share the exciting journey Infrastructure NSW has been on with Objective to move to Objective ECM as a service and the challenges behind that decision.

Infrastructure New South Wales was established in 2011 to provide independent, evidence-based advice to assist the government in identifying and prioritising the delivery of public infrastructure for New South Wales. With 220 staff, as well as a lot of contractors and consultants, the organisation reports directly to the Premier of New South Wales and the New South Wales cabinet.

Infrastructure NSW was challenged with managing three separate Objective ECM accounts after a merger and needed to find a solution to better manage and consolidate their information.

The challenge of managing three separate Objective ECM versions

In 2019, as part of the Machinery of Government changes, other infrastructure projects such as the Barangaroo Delivery Authority and Urban Growth Development Corporation, were merged into Infrastructure New South Wales after the State election. The Machinery of Government changes took everyone by surprise. They were announced on a Friday and implemented within a few days. This is when the journey with Objective ECM really began.

As a result of the changes, Infrastructure New South Wales grew from 47 staff to well over 200. There were office moves, restructures, data migrations and other challenges to address. Each of the three departments were using Objective ECM, but different versions had been customised to suit each organisation. Users had to maintain access to the separate networks and information was going into multiple repositories.

Migrating to Objective ECM as a service

To reduce risk and simplify processes, Infrastructure NSW made the decision to move to a single solution as a way of simplifying the environment and decided to move to Objective ECM as a service. This involved three trial migrations and user testing to ensure that the project consolidation would be successful.

At top level, Objective users now have access to Infrastructure NSW, Barangaroo and Urban Growth folders which then flow into their corresponding Objective environments. As long as they have permissions, the users can search and navigate all three. A prefix was applied before the record ID to help identify which environment the records came from when searching. This was done to avoid having three policies with the same name and a user unsure which environment the documents had come from.

What’s next?

Phase one of consolidating three Objective ECM accounts to one account as a service is complete. Infrastructure NSW is looking forward to Phase Two in which they will move from Navigator and upgrade to Objective ECM 11 to enjoy the user experience of Objective IQ. Along with this comes the planning for training users as well as the opportunity to reinvigorate information management strategies and roadmaps.

From there, Phase three will come after new add-ons and integrations such as Objective Gov365 to archive Teams channels and conversations that grew in response to the COVID-19 lockdown. Phase three will also include automated email capture so that users can drag and drop communications directly into Objective ECM.

For a detailed exploration of Infrastructure NSW’s story, watch the video above.