Case Study: North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT)

SOLUTION SUMMARY

North Carolina is experiencing tremendous population growth and new challenges and opportunities. More emphasis than ever is on transportation, which means leveraging all the state’s transportation infrastructure to ensure a vibrant and healthy economy for future generations. That in turn means having easy, quick, and reliable access to complete and accurate information is critical. The IQ Business Group Inc (IQBG), along with members of NCDOT’s IT group implemented an Enterprise Information Management solution with components from Microsoft, OpenText, Bentley, and SAP to manage the combined structured and unstructured content supporting North Carolina’s transportation needs. In addition to the Division of Motor Vehicles, this includes maintaining approximately 80,000 miles of roadways, 13,000 bridges and culverts, and implementing rail, aviation, ferry, public transit, and bicycle and pedestrian transportation programs.

CHALLENGE

NCDOT was dealing with ever-increasing volumes of both paper and digital records resulting in:

• Overwhelmed business processes
• Processing backlogs
• Impediments to delivering service levels demanded by constituents
• Difficulties finding information needed for daily work tasks and knowing if the information found was current or complete
• Costly and time-consuming to respond to public information requests
• Low compliance applying records management policies

Information governance was difficult to implement on an enterprise basis because of siloed departmental systems, paper-laden business processes, lack of standards in how information was named or stored, issues applying security, outdated governance policies, and no consistent compliance of records retention or disposition.

SOLUTION STRATEGY

IQBG consultants developed a strategy for EIM and ECRM that would enable employees to fulfill information requests, improve business processes, raise service levels, and increase compliance by utilizing digital capture, storage, records retention, retrieval, and workflow functionality. A primary goal was to identify an Enterprise solution that would address current issues around the paper, electronic content, processes, collaboration, records management, security, and remote access. Importantly, given the size of the agency and the volume of the content it managed, the resultant solution had to be both scalable and extensible.

Services were delivered in a multi-phased program.

For Phase One, IQBG conducted our proven high-level assessment (HLA) of NCDOT’s current and future ECRM opportunities. Interviews with NCDOT personnel and a study of the current systems and projected application growth provided the background information necessary to develop recommendations. To create the strategic roadmap, IQBG consultants collected data from over 200 business unit representatives in more than 50 departments.

The EIM/ECRM Roadmap included:

• A Content Inventory and Back File Conversion Plan
• Scanning Approach including OCR/ICR and forms processing
• Documentation of Business Processes and Future Process Recommendations
• Technology Assessment, Enterprise Reference Architecture, and GAP Analysis
• Business Case, Cost Justification, and ROI Analysis
• Information Model and Security Roles
• Roadmap project and task Implementation Sequencing Recommendations
• Governance Framework – Community of Practice, Center of Excellence, knowledge repository, Core Taxonomy, Communications, and Training plans

The HLA was followed by Requirements Analysis that produced Functional Descriptions (FD) to support the first set of implementation projects and determine the requirements and approach related to SharePoint integration, engineering workflows, eSignature, and eForms requirements.

IQBG guided NCDOT’s evaluation of software solutions and eventually negotiated with OpenText to treat the acquisition as an upgrade of already owned legacy software and crediting maintenance payments to the new purchase. IQBG was then asked to assist with the implementation phase following NC ITS system development lifecycle (SDLC) guidelines for planning, design, and implementation; and, along with these tasks included establishing the governance organization and authoring records management policies.

OPENTEXT CONTENT SERVER (OTCS) SUITE

The OpenText suite of products is a market-leading ECRM solution incorporating a full scope of enterprise information management capabilities and providing end-to-end content and records lifecycle governance. Following the implementation of OTCS, NCDOT is achieving higher productivity, higher service levels to constituents, improved eGovernment (self-service), shorter processing times, and greatly improved records management and regulatory compliance.

Extended ECM for SAP provided out-of-the-box integration with HR and Accounting systems, leveraging higher returns on current investments while raising productivity levels. Using the eForms module, NCDOT was able to enable self-service applications that collected needed information without requiring staff entry and automatically initiated workflows, which greatly reduced processing times, providing immediate acknowledgments and raising levels of services.

Extended ECM for Engineering (MicroStation Connector) and the use of eSignature functionality allowed engineering collaboration and approval processes to be re-engineered to provide better tracking and reduce project backlogs. OpenText’s Advanced Governance & Archiving (AGA) for SharePoint allowed MS SharePoint to act as a collaboration platform and a ‘window’ into the OpenText repository. IQBG helped implement this EIM strategy of managing work-in-progress content with less strict governance. This allowed for automated integration, which supports unobtrusive retention and disposition and the storage of longer-term records in the Content Server repository.

RESULTS:

Improved enterprise information management using ECRM: the entire content lifecycle from capture through disposition or archive was redesigned using OCR/ICR, eForms, born-digital capture, automated workflow, integration with CAD and business systems, and highly functional search. ECRM functionality combined with best practice design, standardized taxonomy, and architecture moved NCDOT to a much higher level of digital processing and regulatory compliance. NCDOT (staff, partners, and constituents) now take advantage of the following:

• Self-service applications and access to associated records
• Greater transparency across all business processes
• Highly functional search capabilities
• Less time spent entering metadata or declaring records and more time doing work tasks
• Easier access to information and support for collaboration
• Automated retention and disposition processes
• Better management and tracking of engineering processes
• Alignment between information governance tools, organization, and policy.