Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Malta Regulator Renews Its Information Management Strategy To Achieve Strategic Competence
Overview
Country or Region: Malta
Industry: Government Agencies
Customer Profile
The Malta Communications Authority (MCA) is responsible for regulating all facets of Malta's communications sector, including electronic communications, radio, e-commerce, and postal service.
Business Situation
The MCA needed an agile business environment backed up by a deft information management strategy. However, it found that its legacy Lotus Notes platform application environment could not support its aspirations.
Solution
The MCA made the strategic decision to migrate its information management backbone to Microsoft Exchange Server and SharePoint, replacing all its legacy-based applications and databases.
Benefits
Substantial Productivity Gains
Better Collaboration
Better-Informed Decision Making
More Support Options
Future-Ready Environment / “The main motivation behind the migration... was a strategic decision to choose an environment which would best be able to support the business; now and into the future.”
Steve Agius, Chief Information Officer, Malta Communications Authority
The Malta Communications Authority (MCA) is responsible for regulating all facets of the communications sector in the densely populated southern European island nation. When it sought to implement its next generation business environment, it found its legacy Lotus Notes environment not up to the task of delivering the agile information management capabilities it required. As a result, the MCA moved to the Microsoft platform, successfully migrating all applications and databases, and increasing productivity by 10% to 15%.
Situation
The Malta Communications Authority (MCA) is responsible for regulating all facets of the communications sector in the country, including electronic communications, radio, e-commerce, and postal service, with a view to fostering sustainable competition, encouraging innovation, and protecting consumers.
Given that information and communications comprised such an integral part of its charter, it was incumbent upon MCA to ensure that it had in place an agile business environment that was backed up by an equally deft Information Management (IM) strategy.
In January 2008, the MCA kicked off its aggressive forward-thinking IM strategy to better create and share knowledge, as well as provide the right information on demand to support decision making.
Central to this strategy was a need to cater for growth, market change and complexity, and also, deal with information silos on legacy systems.
The MCA found that its next-generation information management aspirations were not fully attained by its legacy Lotus Notes platform, which MCA found challenging to scale, upgrade or customize, given the scarcity of Lotus Notes system integrators and developers.
“The MCA sought to transform the enterprise, break away from legacy roots and leverage new, cost-effective technologies to raise the bar on IT performance. Moreover, the MCA anticipated a shift in the business environment that called for increased collaboration through workflows, robust messaging and collaboration platform and greater reliance on mobility,” says Steve Agius, Chief Information Officer, MCA.
“But the current Information Management environment [around Lotus Notes] could not cater for the changes brought about by our new strategy.”
Explains Norman Cutajar, Manager, Computime Limited, the Microsoft partner who worked closely with the MCA to explore its options: “MCA was experiencing issues with its Lotus Notes applications due to fast changing business requirements and little to no availability locally of application developers to carry out complex customization that would approximate these business requirements.”
Despite an initial preference to upgrade to Lotus Notes 10, it eventually became clear that the effort and challenge of doing so would be akin to switching to a new solution.
“A number of alternatives were explored, including keeping the current environment, upgrading the current environment, or migrating the existing environment to another platform,” says Agius.
“MCA’s analysis showed the Microsoft platform would provide the organization lower operating costs, savings in capital and a high ROI.”
Solution
As a result, the MCA made the strategic decision to migrate its information management backbone to Microsoft Exchange Server and SharePoint, a successful endeavor which offered tight integration and robust management tools.
MCA worked closely with Computime Limited to map out its mission-critical needs and potential areas of risk, embark on a proof of concept, and ensure that business operations were not hindered.
Once the proof of concept was completed, the MCA proceeded with the implementation of groupware and collaboration, SharePoint 2007, workflow applications and team-spaces.
“The transition from a Lotus to a Microsoft environment was a massive challenge. The migration could not interfere with business operations and it was very important to ensure that it delivered on the promised outcomes,” says Agius.
For instance, one core application that was central to the business operations of the MCA and heavily used by its staff was a specific custom-based application that allowed the transfer and categorization of e-mails from local mailboxes onto Lotus libraries.
Given that the initial effort to find and fine-tune this application despite the various limitations and idiosyncrasies of Lotus Notes had been a resource-intensive exercise, the MCA was wary of disrupting the workflow that its people had become familiar with.
This requirement was addressed by Computime which brought online a third party application from Colligo Networks. The application was customized to integrate with SharePoint to enable business users to easily access, modify, and create SharePoint content through familiar desktop interfaces.
This allowed users to attach metadata to e-mail messages and save them into document libraries, instantly capturing critical message metadata, boosting professional productivity, improving content management, and increasing the number of e-mails and documents classified in SharePoint in one fell swoop.
The robustness of the Microsoft and Colligo Networks solution was further enhanced with the automation of these workflow processes through the creation of InfoPath forms and a two-phase authentication process to ensure a high level of security.
As a result, MCA end users found themselves tapping the powerful collaboration features of SharePoint through the familiar user interface of Office, Excel, and Outlook, thanks to the tight integration of applications within the Microsoft Office System as well as with third party solutions.
“Computime provided the innovation required to make the project succeed and delivered the solution on time and on budget. From the initial stages of engagement through the successful completion of the project, MCA’s champion team worked relentlessly with the supplier to develop a strong understanding of our IT requirements and develop a plan with minimal impact on on-going operations,” says Agius.
Benefits
Substantial Productivity Gains
As a result of the migration, the MCA realized significant user productivity benefits, with productivity gains of about 10% to 15% due to faster information acquisition. This freed up time for MCA staff to serve its external constituents.
Reduced IT Operations Cost
Moving away from Lotus Notes to a more integrated and advanced Microsoft platform allowed the MCA to retire legacy infrastructure that its people no longer used, thanks to enhanced processes and workflows made possible by Exchange and SharePoint. This, says Agius, shaved long-term IT operations cost by 15%.
“Our projections indicate that…we are expecting a return on investment in just 10 months.”
Better Collaboration for Remote Workers
“The Microsoft collaboration platform provided better integration and functionality for our people, many of whom work remotely,” he elaborates.
“This is in line with the MCA teleworking policy that has been designed to improve work opportunities, employ flexible hours, promote wider employment and work opportunities, save costs, improve productivity and motivation and improve staffing flexibility.”
Better-Informed Decision Making
Vince Vella, Enterprise Platform Manager, Computime, notes that the Microsoft solution also allowed people to make better-informed decisions since business-critical information is now in one central location, and shared business processes are accelerated across organizational boundaries through the use of InfoPath.
“Moreover, MCA now benefits from a common Microsoft environment, reaping the benefits of cross-product functionality across the whole platform. The seamless and intuitive integration with Microsoft Office tools was also a key advantage of the new solution.”
More Partner and Technical Support Options
Vella adds that by moving to a Microsoft solution, MCA is now able to dramatically open up its options for partner and technical support.
Future-Ready Environment
Moving forward, the MCA will implement an Enterprise Resource Planning system and is working on the re-engineering and modeling of all its business processes. Through the use of InfoPath Services, MCA will deploy web-forms as front-end interfaces to back-end processes and systems.
Concludes Agius: “The main motive behind the migration to a Microsoft environment was a strategic decision to choose an environment which would best be able to support the business; now and into the future. With Microsoft and Computime, together with a great team commitment within MCA, we were able to achieve precisely that.”