"In many cases, we had to rely on the personal knowledge of individuals to retrieve information.  When you manage multiple projects and people leave the organisation, finding information can become extremely time consuming [without a document management system]."
Gary Cox, Business Administrator EDRMS
 

Summary

Landcom is a State-Owned Corporation of the New South Wales Government and is a leader in innovative urban design creating new residential and industrial communities on vacant land and established sites across NSW.

Landcom employs 150 staff across one Head Office (Parramatta), four Regional Offices and six Sales Offices.

Having a distributed workforce, Landcom's challenge was to implement a central solution to replace the numerous document and records repository across the organisation.

DocBanq, working with Landcom, delivered a Electronic Document and Records Management System (EDRMS) that now allows more than 120 development projects to be centrally managed providing full visibility and a single collaboration platform to all staff across the organisation.

The Challenge

Like most government organisations, Landcom had already well established procedures and systems in place for the management of physical records.  However, being a geographically dispersed organisation, wide access to information could not be easily supported considering that:

• All files were managed in physical form by a system available only to the Records Management section.
• Electronic documents were stored across five separate network drives in five different premises across NSW.
• Ministerial correspondence and policy documents were managed in separate databases.
• E-mail was printed and physically placed on file however the more useful electronic equivalents were not captured.

Furthermore, most of the records at Landcom relate to the large number of development projects which can run for many years.  The lack of a standardised project folder structure made the retrieval of information and the collaboration between each business unit even more difficult.  "In many cases, we had to rely on the personal knowledge of individuals to retrieve information.  When you manage multiple projects and people leave the organisation, finding information can become extremely time consuming," said Gary Cox, Business Administrator EDRMS.

So the challenge was to design and build a solution that would not only allow Landcom to manage all its files, records and e-mail centrally but also to support the organisation's land development processes for all projects.

The Solution

Landcom purchased the Objective EDRMS software from Objective Corporation and decided to use the expert services of DocBanq to deliver their business solution.  DocBanq's proven track record and unique expertise in bridging the gap between complex technology and business practices were the main factors for the decision to use DocBanq services.

The implementation started with an analysis and design stage.  This crucial part of the project consisted in analysing the business needs of the organisation and deciding how the technology could be applied to best serve those needs.  Focus groups and design sessions led to the definition of:

• the metadata model
• the data migration requirements
• the training requirements
• the folder hierarchy design; and
• the security model.

The execution stage involved various pilots and peer review sessions to ensure that the solution would meet the needs of the organisation.  These sessions also ensured that users would find the new work methods acceptable and that any issues raised could be addressed in the early phases of the project.

The Results

With the solution now fully operational, Landcom centrally manages the information of more than 120 development projects across NSW.  The standardised project structure based along the development process allows complete management visibility across all areas of the business.  In addition, those business units providing services across projects, such as Legal or Marketing, now have the ability to collaborate with the development team members as opposed to managing information based along departmental lines.  "Now that all staff have the knowledge of where to go to find information, Landcom will increasingly become a learning organisation over the next few years," added Mr Cox.

Also, Landcom staff are very mobile and the requirement to assist other projects managed in other offices is frequent.  Staff can now work from any of the Landcom offices and always access the current information and their work in progress.

Finally, the solution implemented greatly assists Landcom in meeting its compliance obligations.  Access to reports and statistics from the system, in addition to greater information visibility, will facilitate the implementation of records management initiatives in compliance with the NSW State Records Act.

Web:  www.landcom.com.au