W ith the consolidation of a critical business function, from a business unit-level responsibility to a centralized, corporate-level organization, this global company was presented with the opportunity to significantly improve its information management practices using Microsoft SharePoint.
Prior to consolidation, SharePoint was used in isolation across business units located around the world and corporate headquarters, resulting in inefficiencies and missed opportunities. To address this challenge, Access Sciences was asked to develop a Pertempo™- based information and collaboration hub where employees could collaborate on developing best practices and supporting project, engineering, operations, and maintenance work performed by global business units.
Some of the specific challenges included:
Our client’s strong desire to leverage employee expertise across corporate headquarters and global business units drove the need for a standardized, sustainable solution. Having a single place to house best practices, processes, lessons learned, templates, and examples would enhance employee’s ability to collaborate and take advantage of work already completed by others. Making existing information accessible and findable would maximize its reuse and reduce redundant effort.
Information siloes prevented corporate consolidation and collaboration
Pertempo™ for SharePoint
Using Access Sciences’ award-winning Pertempo™ solution as the basis, our team worked collaboratively with client personnel from information/knowledge management, technology, operations, and engineering to design, develop, and deploy a standardized, sustainable collaboration implementation using out-of-the-box SharePoint functionality. It was imperative to work with users across the business to ensure that solution design reflected the ways they thought about and used information. Our team used this as input to configure the system to support of multiple views of content and site navigation. Since not all users look for content using the same search terms or parameters, our team designed ways to access the same information from different points of view. Our Pertempo™ solution provides for automatic assignment of common and function-specific metadata values, facilitating both cross-functional, intuitive search capabilities and meaningful content organization within business units.
Our client’s existing business terminology was all over the place. Our team had to synthesize and standardize it into common metadata values (controlled vocabulary) so that users could identify, manage, and retrieve information with the confidence that they were getting what they were looking for.
So that users weren’t stymied by draconian security access levels, our client agreed to a “no harm to know” approach and our team created an open access model to maximize access to information wherever possible. To make sure the SharePoint users follow policies and procedures when accessing content, we implemented an automated application of records management policies.
With a foundational Pertempo™-based design in place, our team used an Agile approach to implement the solution in conjunction with client SMEs. Since the deployment included intimate client involvement and testing, user acceptance testing (UAT) became a formality. We followed implementation with hands-on post-implementation support and a content migration effort that minimized disruption to client activities.
Finally, our team created a support site and training material for long-term solution growth and sustainment. We delivered training to end users and administrators around the globe to provide a standard by which the new SharePoint solution would be used. And to keep the site sustained, we created transition of governance processes and tools, and rolled these out to client administrators.
Our Pertempo™-enabled open access collaboration hub now provides users with a one-stop shop for best practices, processes, networks, and collaborative support. They can now find and access information relevant to their work even if it was created by an employee in a different business unit or on the other side of the globe. Based on the success of this effort, it is now being adopted across the corporation.
