Transit New Zealand manages and develops the 10,837 kilometre state highway network in New Zealand carrying nearly half of all traffic. It’s a big job, and Yeats says it’s crucial for the organisation to have fast and efficient information management processes.

“We are continuing our emphasis on maintaining and improving the effectiveness of the existing highway infrastructure and increasing its capacity to carry more vehicles, especially through traffic management.

This in itself means coping with a larger overall volume of information.” he says.

Yeats says Transit has already taken initiatives to embrace new information management technology, but there were problems such as the duplication of systems producing information in different parts of the organisation.

“If you were familiar with Transit’s internal structure you could usually find what you needed – if you knew it existed,” says Yeats.

The organisation had developed an intranet, but a review of usage showed it to be relatively low, partly because there was a requirement to log in to it separately from the network login. Another problem has been that web administrators found it difficult to ensure the currency and accuracy of pages and links.

“We had doubts over the integrity of the information and whether people were using it in a timely manner,” says Yeats.

One of Transit’s biggest repositories of information is its Road Asset Maintenance Management  Database which contains millions of items of data relating to everything from the technical condition of various stretches of roads and maintenance records, to details on traffic lights and signage.

“You can go into this database and find out what sort of gravel has been used to build a road and even what the road surface characteristics are like,” says Yeats.

But providing easy and appropriate access to this information is not always straightforward. For example, for every maintenance contract there are an associated set of standards and guidelines for the contractor, and these standards change over time. While a new contractor would need the latest version of the standards, a Transit employee assessing the performance of a contractor would need access to those standards current at the time the contractor was engaged.

Transit prepared a business case for an enterprise content management system in 2003, but before the project was put out to tender, Yeats says his team spent a lot of time with Transit staff discussing their information management needs.

“As a result we gained ownership and buy-in right through the organisation. We held back on going to tender until we had solid support from everyone.”

Transit received about 20 responses to its request for information in 2004, finally short listing two. IBM proposing a common portal-based interface using IBM WebSphere Portal, was the successful bidder.

The Transit tender specified a total solution, and IBM got the green light because it was able to provide the technology directly and showed good understanding of the enterprise content management concept.

IBM’s proposal for a solution based on its IBM Content Manager for Multiplatforms suite of products promises a consistent and customisable framework within which users can access information either through published content or an ad-hoc search using the Omnifind search engine. The content management system will also provide an interface to the corporate applications and services that Transit chooses to make accessible as portlets.

Yeats says the first phase of the system, which is expected to go live before Christmas, will provide access to documents of all types as well as contact data from its CRM system and possibly information held in its roads asset management database.

Overall, Yeats says the IBM Enterprise Content Management System will help Transit to control costs and manage the growth in its information management responsibilities while at the same time providing a framework to ensure the currency and accuracy of that information.

The new system will require little or no knowledge of Transit’s internal structure to use, and will proactively notify any relevant parties of changes to information through automatically generated emails.

“We were impressed with IBM’s concept of enterprise content management and look forward to  it benefiting the organisation. Omnifind delivers what is effectively virtual record management, picking up the association between what were disparate documents. Searches made across multiple systems are completed with sub-second response times. This will be a great help for a large and varied audiences from specialist engineers to kids doing school projects,” said Yeats.

Yeats says the system has plenty of potential for further development and it could take up to five years for its full benefits to be realised. Future initiatives include electronic collaboration, browser-based content creation, and a link with Transit’s geographical information system (GIS).

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September 2005