What tech Infrastructure NSW’s ICT director aligns with business objectives

“It’s important to ensure the technology function isn’t just a set of blinking lights and widgets,” says Sean Carritt, director for ICT and business systems at Infrastructure NSW, the government agency of New South Wales that identifies and prioritizes public infrastructure for economic and social benefit. “Delivering technology that’s well aligned to the business’ overall purpose has been one of my biggest focus areas as a tech leader.”

It’s with this mindset that Carritt undertook a massive project to improve the organization’s approach to content management. As a highly regulated government business, there are clear requirements around record keeping, and strict compliance obligations to adhere to when it comes to accessible data and information generated. But the system he and his team were using, a common legacy enterprise content management tool, was unwieldy and costing them too much. Needing to ensure high levels of compliance and accuracy in recordkeeping, an opportunity arose that was too good to miss. “When we realized we were close to the end of our agreement term with this solution, we knew it was the perfect time to tackle this problem,” he says.

First things first

Carritt and his team started by identifying the different types of work their user groups do, and then looked into where they do this work. As a Microsoft customer that was already heavily invested in 365, they wanted to come up with a way to turn SharePoint into a compliant record keeping platform so people didn’t have to think about document retention and compliance. But when they looked at what others were doing, they found that very few government agencies had effectively tackled this problem. They also explored if any technologies were available to add that compliance layer, and the rigor that’s required from a government department on top of what’s effectively a commodity content management suite. While Microsoft already has a product called Purview that can be used to govern, protect, and manage all your data, trying to apply government record-keeping frameworks onto Purview is hard to do, he says.

“We started looking at different products that would allow us to add compliance layers onto SharePoint, and we found a few options that would enable us to create an environment where we could have a consistent schema for our records, where we can tag information correctly, label documents and emails consistently, capture and retain them appropriately, and then dispose of them properly,” he says. Certain types of information must be retained for a certain period, but once that time is up, you’re obligated to dispose of this data in the correct way, he adds, so they needed a consistent way to keep track of all this information, and what they should do with it at any given time. Plus, he and his team were under pressure to find a new solution before it was time to renew their contract with their incumbent vendor.

Making the change

Given about six months to execute the project, it was critical they put together a crisp migration and implementation plan, with no room to miss key dates. Working within such a tight deadline, he knew they couldn’t execute without bringing business along with them on the journey. “I took our plan to the executive team and made it clear our legacy system was not meeting our compliance goals,” he says. “I also explained how a new solution would give us financial savings, aid our compliance outcomes, and improve the user experience in the long run.”

Acknowledging that change is difficult, he was clear this is not just about putting a new piece technology in place. And he was deliberate about aligning the project objectives with the broader business’ key objectives.

“We knew we needed everybody to change their way of working and shift their business processes, and our executives had to champion this because they understood it was something worth doing,” he says. “When I look back on the project now, I see this as a pivotal moment, because every time the project timeline was at risk or we had a potential stumbling block, we went back to these business leaders and came up with a solution to overcome the hurdle together. I made it clear that IT isn’t going to run this project if business doesn’t fully buy in to what we’re doing. We agreed that any effort to drive change needs to be a business project, not an IT project, and that we drive it together as partners.” 

According to Carritt, he and his team put a massive amount of effort into change management. But, as he discovered, this doesn’t always guarantee positive results. They offered a lot of training and support prior to going live, but attendance was limited. “We thought we’d done a reasonable job communicating that processes are set to change but, on reflection, we weren’t clear about why this was important,” he says. To bridge the knowledge gap once the cutover day arrived, they developed quick guides, produced training manuals, and even held additional sessions during and after the transition that were far better attended. And, again, he went back to business leaders and made sure they pushed their teams to book time to attend training.

In addition to cost and efficiency savings, a positive result from the project was it allows Infrastructure NSW to get more out of their key technology investments. “We already spend a significant amount of money on 365, so we want to squeeze maximum value out of that spend by increasing the organization’s ability to use it intelligently,” he says. “This is a big win for us. It’s about fewer systems used better.”