Regulatory Compliance Auckland Transport
Auckland Transport needed to comply with the Public Records Act but an audit report found that the organisation wasn’t compliant from a document management perspective, while poor meta data resulted in problems with document findability.
As a Council-owned organisation, Auckland Transport is required to comply with the Public Records Act (PRA 2015). But a poor audit report from Risk and Assurance found that the organisation wasn’t compliant from a document management perspective.
Problem
Auckland Transport’s document management problems were creating three main issues for the organisation. Firstly, it was required to comply with the PRA and a poor audit report had found it was not living up to its obligations under the Act. Secondly the way it was handling document creation and submission was confusing for its users.
Users were required to fill out metadata fields when submitting documents but without sufficient guidance on the importance of correct metadata, the results were often poor. Thirdly, this poor metadata resulted in problems with document findability in searches. Documents were spread across both OneDrive and SharePoint and the results of searches were consistently poor, leading to users frustration and productivity loss
Solution
Pingar was chosen to turn AT’s document management away from unstructured, user-generated metadata to an auto classification system built on ontology and taxonomies. Using ontology and taxonomies, the relationships between AT’s business activities, and all the documents generated as a result, were defined. With these structures defined, DiscoveryOne was then able to crawl AT’s document repositories to find, identify and tag all documents based on the new ontology. As odd results were found they were surfaced and reviewed and any changes made in the taxonomy.
The result for AT was a dramatic improvement in both the speed and accuracy of document searches. The ability to reliably identify and locate all relevant documents was vital to AT’s compliance requirements. For example, AT was now able to quickly and accurately identify documents for retention or disposal. And in scenarios such as an HR Exit Procedure, all documents relating to a leaving staff member could be identified for retention within SharePoint.
With Pingar powering its document management, AT was able to go from audit failure to regulatory compliance in a short amount of time and within the project budget.