Tourism Australia Case Study

Tourism Australia is a statutory authority of the Australian Government whose job it is to promote Australia as a tourist destination both internationally and domestically. They operate 19 offices internationally (including Australia) from their Sydney headquarters. They are a diverse, global organisation with a workforce of around 300 people.

File shares were the primary method for business groups to share information with team members and with other business groups. Up to two terabytes of data, which represented hundreds of thousands of files, was being stored in multiple file shares across multiple physical locations.

Given the considerable number of files and documents, the potential for both duplication and documents becoming out of date was high. Searching for and finding the right information became difficult and time consuming and the structure of the file systems became difficult for employees to understand and manage. Much of the inter-team and project communication relied on email. This often meant that important communications were not being seen at the right time or by the right people and in some cases were simply being overlooked.

The way information was created, stored and shared did not make for a highly effective and dynamic organisation. Tourism Australia recognised that in order to fulfil their information management vision things had to change. Internally Tourism Australia’s IT team had been looking at the capabilities of SharePoint as a potential solution to their problem and an answer to their plan of creating a solid communication platform to drive the unification of their Australian and international locations. SharePoint was ultimately selected as the organisation’s ECM platform because of its high degree of customisable functionality and its ability to integrate with Tourism Australia’s desktop environment which was based around Microsoft’s Office suite.

As a statutory authority of the Australian Government, Tourism Australia is bound to regulatory compliance. Therefore, the creation of a robust Records Management system was a primary objective of this change program. In order to achieve this Tourism Australia undertook the development of a solution that integrates well with the SharePoint architecture. The tool selected for management of records and archiving was RecordPoint.

RecordPoint provided records management solution integrated with and augmented SharePoint’s native records management capability. It acts as a business rules engine which automates archiving based on the details contained within the content of the document. It does not require the user to intervene in the classification of the document prior to, during or after it was created. Instead, classification and archiving are automated according to predetermined rules which are aligned with regulatory records management requirements required by Tourism Australia.