Transforming Information into Intelligence

Governments and Corporations seek similar goals

Today's economic climate has both corporations, agencies and departments at all levels of government looking to add value to their businesses. By leveraging knowledge assets, organizations can generate new opportunities, and governments can better serve their consituents. Rather than attempt to build a patchwork solution, both are leveraging existing investments in IT and endeavoring to build a cohesive 360° view of enterprise content. The ultimate goal is to realize tangible, significant, and rapid returns including:

• Enhanced productivity—via customizable workspaces, interoperable solutions and increased collaborative capabilities.;

• Streamlined business processes—via collaboration, knowledge sharing, best practices replication and communities.;

• Fully secured information management.;

• Accelerated “time to knowledge” provided by an integrated model for accessing, analyzing, sharing, managing, and organizing information.;

• Cost savings—a lower total cost of ownership provided by an integrated solution set, rapid deployment time, streamlined application integration and decreased administration.

• Improved efficiencies—eliminate redundancy of knowledge-based work, and reduce time involved with finding information.;

Organizations and governments need a robust framework if they are to maximize competitive advantage, accelerate speed to knowledge, and increase customer or constituent relationship efforts.

Each element of the wheel (below) has specific information- and knowledge-based solutions that enable them:

Access

Access is provided by the user interface, presentation layer, query tools and other elements used to interact with business systems, repositories and other users.

Connect

As much as 80% of enterprise structured data resides in legacy data systems—mainframes, midrange systems, and UNIX data stores. Connectivity to this data is essential.

Manage

With the amount of unstructured information generated by today’s organizations, industrial-strength document management is one of the most strategic investments to be made.

Protect

A common security framework is required to: perform the absolutely critical role of sentry of information and application integrity; to facilitate simplified user-access in providing single sign-on; and to streamline profile maintenance by avoiding multiple security directories for administrators, and multiple passwords and IDs for users.

Find

Search and categorization solutions must interoperate (delivering search and categorization functionality via a com-mon interface) and deliver true unified search capabilities (access to structured and unstruc-tured, internal and external sources) to generate a 360° view of Enterprise Content.

Analyze

Solutions capable of getting at information, transforming it into query- and analysis-conducive formats, and loading and replenishing data stores and applications, coupled with reporting and analysis tools, are required to satisfy this element of the 360° model.

Share

Collaboration tools should not be deployed solely as a means of communication. Rather, collaboration functionality—both asynchronous (e-mail, discussion boards, groupware, calendaring, etc.) and synchronous (application sharing, whiteboarding, chat, etc.)—must be tied to business processes and embedded within information- and knowledge-based solutions.

Publish

With respect to integrated document management, “publish” means the ability to not only check-in new documents, but also speaks to lifecycle management, workflow, routing, and other components of managing unstructured data. The most important factor is ensuring that users are able to publish content from whatever application they are working in to wherever it needs to be.

It is important to keep in mind that fostering a 360° view of content involves not only the interoperation of technologies and business solutions, but also the commitment of users to support it.

Fortunately, the 360° model benefits both constituents and government agencies. It not only generates concrete business value (bottom line return, reduced cost of ownership, etc.), but also drastically changes the efficiency and manner in which constituents or government employees access, manage, work with, and leverage content—for the better.

Taking the 360° View in Government

The basic technologies behind the 360° model, such as document management, business intelligence and records management, have already been applied by many visionary implementers in the public sector toward the task of making government work better. The following are just a few examples of how enterprise information management systems are improving many aspects of daily life for millions of citizens.

Getting to the Games

The Utah DOT’s need for a better document management system started coming into focus in April of 1997, when the agency began a reconstruction project on a 17-mile stretch of Interstate 15 through the Salt Lake valley. The $1.5 billion project came with a deadline: all work had to be completed by October 2001, so as not to affect traffic during the 2002 Winter Olympics.

Karen Gross, imaging specialist for the Utah DOT, says the agency implemented an innovative construction approach called “Design-Build”, in which construction starts and moves forward rapidly before final design plans are finished.

“For the I-15 team, the response time to project correspondence was minimal, because any member of the team could access the system and keep response documents moving,” says Gross. Using the old paper-based system, searching for documents was often frustrating and unfruitful, since the people who entered the data or filed the documents weren’t always around to help locate the needed files.

“One person may have been the only one who knew how to find a certain piece of data,” she adds. “Sometimes, nobody else could find the information.” With the new document management solution in place, search speed and functionality improved like a car moving from a rutted, dirt road to a smooth stretch of blacktop.

Putting Content into Constituents’ Hands

To improve the flexibility, responsiveness and efficiency of federal ministries and agencies, the Government of Canada recognized the need for a document management system that could liberate information stored and duplicated in multiple ministries, departments and agencies. Hummingbird partner CGI Group Inc. was chosen to design, build and implement the Records, Documents, Information Management System (RDIMS) for the Canadian federal government.

“RDIMS allows users to classify their own records, search for records and submit retrieval requests from their desktops,” says Richard Spratt, Senior Consultant, CGI. “Putting records into the hands of users extends benefits to people who formerly had no experience with records management.” Through RDIMS, word-processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, photos, forms, images and e-mail messages can all be created, archived and searched.

First Nations Come First

Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) is primarily responsible for meeting the federal government’s constitutional, treaty, political and legal responsibilities to First Nations, Inuit and Northerners. Its mandate is derived largely from more than 50 statutes. Consequently, INAC’s mandate is complex and its responsibilities encompass a broad range of services. Ron Patterson, CIDM Project Manager at INAC, was part of an interdepartmental working group tasked to define the Canadian federal government’s records and document management needs, evaluate the bids and select the winning solution.

“The advantages of electronic document management are easily observed,” says Patterson. “We’ve realized savings in shutting down shared drives, and basic things like cabinets and office space, as well as a reduction in overall handling and records management workflow from the previous paper environment.”

INAC will also realize significant savings in general litigation costs related to pre-trial research and document assembly. “We anticipate a savings of millions of dollars based on the improved ability to track down documents and pre-existing research relevant to litigation. Now that everything can be easily searched, we don’t have to worry about re-doing work that has been done in the past,” says Kirk Douglas, National CIDM Coordinator. Hummingbird's open architecture incorporates virtually any computing environment to manage and control network-based information across a variety of applications, platforms, databases, networks and geographic locations.

Putting the Intelligence Back into Crime Fighting

When the task at hand is solving or preventing crime, there is no substitute for accurate, timely information. Although law-enforcement agencies have been automating the use of crime-related data for many years, a large number of the older systems are mainframe-based, using batch-processing methods that can only produce limited queries and reports. For the justice officials of Oakland County, Michigan, a quickly growing “world technology center,” the old reporting system was no longer meeting policing needs.

For three decades the Oakland County-based Courts and Law Enforcement Information System (CLEMIS) has been servicing a part of the Detroit metropolitan area that spans three counties, with a population of approximately two million.

Justice officials wanted a solution that could more quickly and flexibly analyze and report on the data that officers collect. They wanted to take data sitting in computers and put its power back into the police officers’ hands, to help them better investigate crimes, or recognize patterns of criminal activity, using the knowledge and analysis possessed by the entire department.

Joe Sullivan, manager of the CLEMIS project, says Oakland County’s main goal was to provide officers with easy and timely access to records data for crime investigation, as well as management and administrative reporting.

“The mainframe system was too complex for casual use. CLEMIS is an investigative tool, and a strategic planning tool. The police were putting information into the system, and they wanted to get it back out quickly,” Sullivan explains.

“With a PC-based reporting system, data can be extracted daily,” says Sullivan. “The data now is much more current, much more powerful, and there are a greater number of users with access to it.”

From a “design-build” project to get the highways built for the 2002 Olympics in Utah, to the Indian and Northern Affairs Department in Canada, where decades-old treaties are administered and enforced, to a county government policing initiative, governments are increasing their responsiveness to citizens’ needs through the use of information technology. The 360° model provides a framework which will allow the government to easily leverage existing investments to quickly improve efficiencies by enhancing productivity, streamlining business, securing and allocating information, providing cost savings, and ultimately accelerating users’ “time to knowledge.”

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Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Hummingbird Ltd. is a global enterprise software company that employs 1300 people in 40 offices worldwide.The company’s revolutionary Hummingbird Enterprise™, an integrated information and knowledge management solution suite, manages the entire lifecycle of an organization’s information and knowledge assets. Hummingbird Enterprise creates a customized 360° view of enterprise content with a portfolio of products that are both modular and interoperable.Today, five million users representing 90% of the Fortune 500 and 85% of the Fortune 100 companies rely on Hummingbird products and solutions to connect, manage, access, collaborate, publish and search their enterprise content.