Five months into launching its new content management system, the NSW Office of Sport is seeing how this move was not just about moving to cloud and reaping cost benefits, but it also led to creating a productive staff environment.
Citadel Group’s Information Exchange (Citadel IX) content management system (CMS), which uses Micro Focus Content Manager, was the cloud platform that successfully won the tender process last year, with the system going live in December.
The smarts behind the CMS derived from Citadel’s $17.5 million acquisition of HP TRIM and HPE Records Manager partner, Kapish in 2016. Micro Focus purchased HPE’s software division, bringing Content Manager under its remit.
Speaking at the Micro Focus Realize 2019 event in Sydney, NSW Office of Sport director of information and technology, Ingrid McAlpine, expressed how records management in government agencies was a highly regulated task, along with the intense need to be compliant with a number of policy and legislative obligations.
The NSW Office of Sport is a relatively small organisation, but it joined forces with a number of other sporting organisations such as the Sydney Olympic Park Authority, NSW Institute of Sport and Venues NSW, which look after a number of sporting fields such as ANZ Stadium, WIN Stadium in Wollongong; newly opened BankWest Stadium in Parramatta, and McDonald Jones Stadium in Newcastle.
The aim of the project, McAlpine explained, was to have a single platform and a single team to manage that consortium of agencies across NSW government.
At its core, the NSW Office of Sport runs many types of initiatives such as the Active Kids Program, which brings upon a multitude of forms, documents, unstructured data and images, McAlpine said.
“Our aim was to have information available to our staff anywhere, anytime, any place, to be more cost effective, efficient, and to meet all our regulatory and legislative obligations,” she said.
“Even though the project had a large technical component, it was largely change management. We brought about people using electronic document management rather than printing out pieces of paper, signing and scanning it back into the system, and filing it away.
“We now have full electronic approvals, and a result, we made savings in this space, but it wasn’t just a cost saving, it also impacted on employee productivity -- finding information, knowing where it is, and no longer re-doing tasks.”
As a result of the new CMS, the NSW Office of Sport is now looking into how to further embed the solution into its business processes across the organisation with a longer term view of dabbling into machine learning, artificial intelligence, data loss prevention and the ability to mine unstructured data, McAlpine said.
“We’re not there yet, but we’re moving in that direction. This is just the start,” she said. “From the data we’re gathering, we’re starting to make better decisions on how we provide sport, and sport infrastructure across NSW.”
Citadel Group director of sales Stewart Hollingdrake, said it took about 18 months to develop Citadel IX, which uses Microsoft Azure, and is the only end-to-end ISO 27001 certified content management platform globally.
“It’s very easy for a partner to put something on the cloud like Azure, with an ISO certification and say it’s ISO certified, but the reality is that we’ve got that at a base level, and all the procedures and processes on the platform have been independently certified as well,” he said.
“Using Azure with their ASD certification to protect it with our ISO 27001 certification, means we can securely look after the information in the cloud, and make it available to people anywhere, anytime, in their office, at home and on mobile devices.”
