Last year, the State Lands Commission modernized to a Microsoft Office 365 system and then began migrating its intranet to SharePoint and automating some business processes. The commission wanted to use platforms instead of single solutions, and one of the larger projects under that effort was automating the review process for staff reports.
After only two iterations, the newest platform is saving the department hours of labor every month.
Mike Farinha, the commission's Applications Team supervisor, told Techwire in an interview: "In general state entities, we're about 250 staff total, so we haven't had a lot of access to robust systems until these cloud solutions came along. So we were very eager to move forward with these solutions."
The staff reports are part of the most critical processes for the commission, according to Farinha. Reports can involve more than 12 people, depending on how complicated that research is.
"That research has to go through a series of approval processes, so it's very intensive, and it has to go up and down the chain," Farinha said. "And even once it's approved, it can go back down and get changed. It's a highly fluid process, and we have to keep track of where everything is at any given moment."
So the commission worked with Kiefer Consulting to create a SharePoint platform that was deployed in November, after under a year of development.
Kiefer brought in SharePoint experts, project managers and developers to smooth the transition.
"They came with a plan, they came with a mockup," Kristin Schwartz, lead SharePoint administrator for the commission, told Techwire in an interview. "I think it helped to bridge that gap between what the users are doing and what they're going to get."
Before the SharePoint solution, the commission had an "email add-on" that could crash the system, be lost as attachments under other files and was untraceable, Grace Kato, assistant division chief of the Land Management Division, told Techwire in an interview.
The old system cost time because documents would need to be found, clerical staff would have to track documents on another document, and physical files may have to be moved between offices.
“The new solution centralizes all the documents in a secure environment that is accessible any time by the staff. It was a pleasure working Kristin. She is an enthusiastic SharePoint administrator who worked with the business users at every step of the way. Kiefer assembled a powerful and flexible solution,“ Gatika Patel, SharePoint Consultant wrote to Techwire.
The new system reports twice a day on document status and is searchable, reviewable, and requires complete information before it can be moved to the next step.
"The SharePoint option has forced a lot of the users to have to follow a specific protocol, whereas our prior systems allowed more flexibility. As management, we'd rather have that system locked down," Kato said.
The system is also more mobile, Schwartz said.
Schwartz said it took two iterations to make sure all needs were met.
Involving business departments in the decisions and using pilot groups to run through early iterations of the project honed in on developing a product that worked, Kiefer consultant Mark Collins said.
Training was begun by Kiefer and taken over by the commission, but some executives felt they needed little to no training because they considered the system intuitive.
