Dandenong City Council also expects to see greater collaboration through a new document versioning capability, as well as an improvement in processing times for applications and approvals thanks to the revision of its document classification process under the new ECM system, Meier says.
“We revised our classification scheme and based it on functions and activities rather than organisational structure,” he says. “Accordingly, people will have improved access to documents across organisational units. At the moment access is largely based on the organisational unit people belong to and that makes information sharing and collaboration more difficult.”
Despite current media hype surrounding the Cloud Computing and Software-as-Service (SAAS) application delivery models, Meier says security concerns about cloud applications prompted the Council to go with Objective and its onsite-only hosting option.
“[Cloud Computing] technology isn’t quite there yet; particularly for a system that will become one of our most important information systems,” he says. “At this point in time, the risk of Cloud Computing is too high.”
Meier says the infrastructure cost for hosting the solution internally only amounted to about 15 percent of the total project budget, with only one extra server and one additional SAN tray required for extra storage.
He also stressed that the Council’s successful piloting of the new ECM to date was the result of collaboration with other Councils, which had also begun implementing similar ECM projects.
Managing cultural change within the Council was also key. “We started with an awareness session to reinforce with staff what their obligations were for managing corporate records to get away from the approach where people kept their own records,” Meier says. “We also involved a number of our key users early and had a selection process where the end-users had a say.”