King County Cloud-Based SharePoint
The King County cloud-based SharePoint system, featuring one-click deployment of web parts, was discussed at the March 18, 2011 Local Government Webmasters Meeting. A summary is posted below.
Document-management needs: Document management features determine how documents in an organization are created, reviewed, published, and accessed.
County need: The county doesn't have standardized methods or processes for authoring and approving documents, organizing their storage, finding them, and publishing them. This has led to editorial inefficiencies and errors, inconsistent means of and locations for organizing documents , difficulty in finding documents, and publishing errors.
Records-management/retention needs: Records management is the process of collec ting, managing, and disposing of corporate records (information deemed important for the history, knowledge, or legal defense of a company) in a consistent and uniform manner based on an organization's policies.
County need: The county is legally obligated to retain specific types of documents for established amounts of time, but it lacks the technical tools to support that obligation. Integration of the County's records-management tool with SharePoint would help the County meet that obligation
Web content-management needs: Web content management is the process of creating and maintaining websites and the information and services hosted within them.
County need: While the County employs a Web content management tool on the Internet (Sitecore), it lacks a similar tool for publishing internal websites, and instead relies on the inefficiencies of hand-coded HTML. This has resulted in a largely unmanaged intranet, containing dangerous amounts on dated, inaccurate, or otherwise useless information. Sitecore, Microsoft's SharePoint, and others offer Web content-management solutions for intranets.
Employee-collaboration needs: Employee collaboration is the process of meeting, communicating, and working together on projects and documentation.
County need: Teams, often cross-agency, are constantly forming across the County to work on projects or develop documents together. Often working at great distances from one another, teammates rely on a mostly 20 th-century toolset: conference rooms, telephones, e-mail, and poorly organized agenda, minutes, and other documentation. Today's tools can greatly improve the collaborative process, with remote-meeting functionality, focused online workspaces, document versioning, tasking, milestone measurement, and so forth.
Information-access needs: Information access is enabled via searching and browsing. Effective enterprise search is the ability to, using a search engine, easily search and locate documents and other forms of information across multiple county electronic systems (collections, websites, file servers). Effective browsing is the ability to easily navigate through websites, hyperlinks, folders, subfolders, and so forth to quickly locate the documents and other forms of information.
County need: It's estimated that information workers spend roughly 30 percent of their time looking for information. With an effective search and browse strategy (and ideally a document-management process ), backed up by tools that could support it, how much of that costly search time could we shave off?
Business-process needs: Many traditional business processes can be streamlined through the use of electronic forms and automated workflows.
County need: Far larger than we know, but at this point, consider all the many paper forms we have to a) find, b) fill out, c) route, d) approve, and e) file away. Many such forms, their workflow routes, an d their final resting places, can be automated within a tool such as SharePoint. Expenditure requests. Absence requests. Etc.
Business-intelligence needs: Business intelligence functionality helps information workers in assembling unstructured and structured data from multiple sources and in publishing that data on websites.
County need: Unknown, but DNRP has expressed a desire for such functionality. On-premises SharePoint is said to effectively address business intelligence, so we may have the capability shortly.
Employee-communications needs: Employee communications is the process of enabling swift, clear communications b etween co-workers, between managers and their employees, and between top-level management and all staff.
County need: County managers and employees routinely report being surprised to learn information through the grapevine that they arguably should have heard from their co-workers or managers - information that likely would have changed their priorities and/or their work behaviors. Moreover, the managers and employees are routinely at risk of carrying around and spreading misinformation, because incorrect information wasn't caught and corrected early enough. Most employees don't know the County's strategic goals, or their departments'. Many aren't aware of projects that will impact them, or of those that will impact projects they're working on. And we inadvertently end up working at cross purposes. SharePoint can address a portion of this, but truly refined employee communications can only be realized in the execution of an enterprise-wide internal communications strategy.
Employee-productivity/efficiency needs: Employee productivity/efficiency is the key to producing as much as possible at the least cost.
County need: It's estimated that a 1,000-person company, lost productivity costs roughly $5M per year. We're 11,000 knowledge workers strong, so no doubt were in the tens of millions lost. Wastewater Treatment's Environmental Lab thinks it will become startlingly more productive once it moves its traditional contracting process (with thousands of sheets of paper, dozens of mailings, and untold number of document u pdates per contract) into SharePoint, radically speeding up its ability to process contracts. Certainly many more such opportunities will arise in the coming months...