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Scottish Executive Moves towards ECM with Objective
Public Sector IT project proves a Significant Success
"This is the single biggest IT enabled business change project ever undertaken by the Scottish Executive. It is viewed as highly successful and is on track to achieve all of its stated goals and deliver all its anticipated benefits, within its agreed budget," says Liz Ure, Head of Information Strategy, Support and Development at the Scottish Executive.
The Scottish Executive is the devolved government in Scotland, overseeing public services such as health, education, justice and transport. It is responsible for the efficient delivery of these services and ensuring they are appropriately managed.
The Scottish Executive recognised that a significant amount of information could not be shared quickly or easily within the organisation. Sharing of information was required to support the culture of openness and collaboration the Executive is striving to achieve, which is aimed at helping the organisation to be more responsive to the demands placed on it both by Scottish Ministers and by citizens and stakeholders.
"Information is the lifeblood of the Scottish Executive'" says Liz. "Placing a greater emphasis on accessibility, accuracy, efficient storage and retrieval of information is seen as key to securing sustainable improvements in the organisation's agility and effectiveness."
Following a OJEU negotiated procurement, the Executive chose Objective's ECM and as a result has transformed the way it manages and maintains its information and records.
The Scottish Executive spent over 18 months at the start of the project on business analysis, which was conducted with project leaders LogicaCMG, before concentrating on the technology element of the program. The business requirements were carefully scoped out and an in-depth, extensive benchmarking exercise carried out on the previous, complex paper driven records system. Once completed, the next step was designing the file plan.
The Scottish Executive set out to secure a range of business benefits, which it is on track to deliver. The key benefits include:
- being able to find the right information more quickly;
- a reduction in the need to store paper on site (which should continue to reduce over time);
- reduction in off site storage; and
- less paper being carried between buildings - transport costs.
- better customer service
- particularly if the right information is readily available and can be provided in a number of different formats, as required;
- better quality work for more junior staff ;
- improved opportunities for flexible working practices;
- improved corporate memory;
- improved corporate governance - both in terms of compliance with legislation, and also in terms of better risk assessment (based on more complete information);
- better access to precedent information;
- more robust and reliable disaster recovery for information and records;
- help meet Government targets for electronic records;
- provide the version control (including safeguards against alteration of records), automated facilities and option to introduce workflow; and
- act as a spur to further culture change.
The Executive also set out to build a platform that would enable further development and exploitation of eRDM and has now started to develop and implement workflow and case handling solutions using Objective. 08.08.2006, Dawn Harnetty
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