Faced with a situation where organisational information was being stored here, there and everywhere, Education New Zealand (ENZ) recognised the security and operational limitations of unstructured data retention. It looked to Intergen for a solution – and with the introduction of the Cohesion cloud enterprise content management (ECM) solution, the organisation has revolutionised not only information storage, but its use, too.
ENZ is New Zealand’s first government agency for international education, which is the country’s fourth largest export earner. Essentially an ‘umbrella marketing organisation’, ENZ provides a pivotal link between government and industry and is tasked with raising awareness of New Zealand as a study destination, supporting education providers and businesses to export their services and products.
Situation
ENZ is a knowledge organisation with a global remit with 90 staff members spread across 17 locations worldwide. As the ambassador for the promotion of New Zealand as a world-leading destination for education, achieving organisation-wide collaboration and information finding and sharing was an absolute imperative for ENZ.
ENZ IT Manager Mat Drake outlines the challenge it faced: “We had numerous shared drives that were named after most of the letters of the alphabet. The upshot of this was that people were doing their own thing. There were a lot of barriers to sharing and people working in silos. It was becoming impossible to find anything.”
Chief Financial Officer Matt Penney describes the opportunity this challenge presented: “We are a knowledge organisation with a strong customer focus. We needed to do more than just record and store our information. We needed a platform that would allow us to really use our information and get the most out of it.”
As a relatively new organisation, ENZ was in the fortunate position of starting with a clean sheet of paper. It saw the opportunity to quickly establish a strong, integrated enterprise content management platform for the future.
ENZ needed a solution that would:
- Work from anywhere and with external education partners
- Seamlessly integrate with its existing SharePoint intranet
- Provide a future-proof platform that would help get the most from functionality in Office 365 and Dynamics 365
Put quite simply, says Penney, the organisation wanted something which would “Allow people to find stuff – search was a really big one for us.”
Solution
The company found the ideal solution in Empired and Intergen’s Cohesion, a Microsoft-based, cloud-delivered ECM as a service offering, designed to help organisations communicate, collaborate and meet their records management requirements. Cohesion was originally created for New Zealand government agencies as one of three offerings available through the New Zealand all-of government enterprise content management services panel, established in November 2013.
Cohesion appealed to ENZ, Penney explains, but there were some initial reservations. “We really liked the idea of inter-agency collaboration and the ability for us to share workflows with other agencies using Cohesion. As a smaller agency one of our bigger concerns was that Cohesion wouldn’t be suitable for us. However, we worked with Intergen to tailor Cohesion to our needs as a smaller agency and it added up.”
Cohesion’s catalogue approach really appealed, Penney added, and helped get a right-sized solution. “It was a case of finding not just the right solution, but also the right partner.”
Working with Intergen to implement Cohesion, ENZ tackled the project with a series of well-structured sprints spanning a total of just four months to get the platform live and in use by its global team.
“As a smaller organisation that doesn’t have dedicated information or change management expertise in-house, we were also particularly pleased to be able to access these services from Intergen,” Penney adds.
He explains that strong change and information management took the complexity out of the project and ensured a best practice implementation. “It was the single biggest reason for the success of the project.”
Hand in hand with this, training was key. “One of the best things we did was create a project team of super users within ENZ, and then draw on Intergen’s change and information management expertise to make sure we had the right level of support along the way.
“Getting critical mass, getting people to spread the message, getting extra training has all helped us drive to the finish much more quickly than we would have been able to otherwise. It has saved us a huge amount of time and effort in the long run.”
Results
With Cohesion in place, ENZ is enjoying multiple business benefits. With a fully extensible, evergreen organisation-wide enterprise management platform that provides a robust, easy to use information backbone to enable ENZ to successfully market New Zealand education to the world, the organisation can share information and collaborate, internally and externally. Cohesion delivers a single source of truth, reducing silos and duplication of information, ensures ‘findability’ of information across the business, which contributes to improved productivity and performance.
Penney says the solution has also delivered time savings, using co-authoring capabilities and best practice, standardised templates and workflows as an example: “The ability to co-author and have watertight version control in Cohesion has been a massive win for us. It saves us a significant amount of time and effort and gives us unprecedented transparency and visibility across our processes and information,” he says.
A strong organisational commitment to change and information management ensured the swift, successful implementation and uptake of Cohesion, while Penney highlights the fast time to value achieved through catalogue approach, allowing ENZ to get a ‘right-sized’ solution and implement it quickly. He puts it colourfully: “The catalogue offered us a vanilla ice-cream approach and then we could choose a few chocolate sprinkles to ensure things moved along quickly.”
Source: This article was originally sourced from Intergen
