Objective crosses Tasman with its enterprise content management solution

Staff Writers
Tuesday, 03 February 2009 08:13

IT Industry - Market

An Enterprise Content Management solution developed by Australian listed technology company, Objective Corporation (ASX:OCL), has been implemented by Environment Bay of Plenty, one of New Zealand’s 13 regional councils.

Objective said in an announcement today that the New Zealand council had implemented the technology to manage not only published documents, but also the process of producing information.

According to Obective, the Environment Bay of Plenty (EBoP) council promotes the social, economic, environmental and cultural well-being of communities in the Bay of Plenty region and manages the environmental attributes of land, water, coast and air, and also oversees economic development, passenger transport, harbour navigation and safety, regional planning and infrastructure such as roads and broadband.

Objective said EBoP maintained a strong commercial focus with a desire to continually improve its processes for greater productivity.

“Coupled with this, it sees its entire purpose reliant on its ability to make its work transparent and accessible to the communities it serves. Managing the full document lifecycle through all business processes offered EBoP the opportunity for significant productivity improvements,” a spokesman for Objective said.

Mr Miles McConway, Group Technology Manager, EBoP said that “unlike district or city councils, EBoP is not a catchment for mountains of incoming documents that require processing, such as development applications, dog registrations and parking permits.

“Our needs reside around document authoring and collaboration. For example, policy development, planning, collecting and collating research data and environmental reporting, and then providing access to this information to our partner councils and the public.

“If we can control the way we manage, process, publish and share our information we can identify opportunities to improve these processes. By understanding our workflows we begin to ‘know what we know’ and are also able to identify what we don’t know. We see Objective’s workflow as being a key enterprise tool to enable us to do this.”

EBoP said that, as part of the planning for the implementation, it had mapped hundreds of workflows around the organisation and would initially be implementing around 60 workflows using Objective.

Jim Fretwell, EBoP’s Principal Business Solutions Specialist, said integrating the ECM platform with EBoP’s existing business applications was seen as critical for optimising business processes and encouraging user uptake.

“Objective’s Web Services architecture gives us the ability to build integrations to our line of business applications on a standards-based platform, delivering vast improvements to our business.”