Customer Segment: Government
The Challenge
Our customer is a large government agency. The agency has a large team of PM’s, BA’s and Architect’s and Business Partners. These teams are producing unprecedent amount of information that is both useful and relevant. Architects and other team members usually leverage TOGAF or other architecture frameworks ensuring high quality work and outcomes. The various artefacts produced are stored across SharePoint, network locations, folder structures, OneDrive and more.
Whilst referencing the above there is currently no comprehensive system for organising this information in a common language structure that the entire EA team understand ( i.e. mapping information artefacts initially to Domains/Sub Domains/Architecture Key Domains and further to Strategy, Patterns, Roadmaps, Registers and more with various business rules)
We explored this further and noticed following key problems faced by EA teams –
- EA documents become spread out and are sometimes held within numerous locations – network drives, the intranet, cloud document storage (OneDrive etc.), Email folders, SharePoint document libraries, etc.
- The corporate structure for filing documents is extremely complex and does not fit with EA frameworks like TOGAF
- Considering above even the best of Search mechanism sometimes does not produce desirable results.
- When users are re deployed or leave the organisation, finding the documents that relate to their role in the various network locations, SharePoint libraries and folders becomes difficult
- People then have to ask others where to locate a document, eventually become frustrated and then ‘reinvent the wheel’, introducing further complexity.
- Email is the main form of internal (and External) document distribution and many users use their email folders as an informal document management system.
- Documents attached to emails create a duplication nightmare as slightly different versions of documents are passed around from user to user causing confusion and slowing down the processes the documents are meant to be supporting.
- Collaboration and communication remain the key areas of priority for these teams considering the information produced is often re-used in various areas of the business supporting architecture best practices.
- There are no custom view of EA world to Executives, Business Partners and Business units.
- Business partners then have to rely upon limited information (or sometime too deep technical information) they may have forcing them to ask EA team for (sometimes) repetitive information
The Solution
To better support EA teams, Prometix have developed an EA Portal that can work with your on-premise SharePoint or SharePoint Online(in O365), providing a Ux designed, intuitive portal for providing role based information (execs, EA Team, Business, Business Partners and external vendors if required) allowing easy information storage, retrieval and searching while focusing on the required governance and framework that needs to be adhered.
This solution uses SharePoint online as the platform. The views have been classified into three areas:
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- Business
- Technical
- Executive
Customised interfaces using SP client scripting model used to display the information in modern tile-based format. These tiles can easily be customised. PowerBI is used for the reporting.
Business Benefits
- Pre-configured EA portal ready to feed documents
- Ready to connect to PowerBI for smart reporting
- Role based portal allowing personalised information
- Aligned to EA teams and their common terminology, processes and standards
- More effective search and retrieval of information
- Ability to apply access and security controls to documents and information
- Retention of intellectual property and quick access to IP developed organisation wide
- Opportunity for standardised ways of working
- Consistency of processes, saving documents etc. across the department and organisation
- Increase in employee Efficiency: The centralised knowledge management platform provides effective document search and
- Ownership: The new platform encourages employees to take ownership of information ensuring information integrity and reliability
