enterprise

content

platform

ENZ needed a platform that would allow them to really use their information and get the most out of it. It had to be enterprise-wide and allow people to find information quickly.

Back

Project Snapshot

Education New Zealand

Location:
Wellington, New Zealand

Industry:
Education & Research

Project Challenges

Numerous shared drives with a lot of barriers to sharing and people working in silos. Impossible to find anything.

The Solution

Implemented a tailored Cohesion platform - a cloud-based ECM for inter-agency collaboration and sharing workflows. Training services, change and information management expertise drove the project.

Results

Seamless integration with existing intranet, work from anywhere model, future-proof platform with loads of functionality, ability to find what they want, quickly.

Download case study

The situation

Education New Zealand (ENZ) is New Zealand’s first government agency for international education, which is the country’s fourth largest export earner. Essentially an “umbrella marketing organisation”, ENZ provides a pivotal link between government and industry and is tasked with raising awareness of New Zealand as a study destination, supporting education providers and businesses to export their services and products.

The challenge – and the opportunity

ENZ is a knowledge organisation with a global remit, and 90 staff spread across 17 locations worldwide. As the ambassador for the promotion of New Zealand as a world-leading destination for education, achieving organisation-wide collaboration and information finding and sharing was an absolute imperative for ENZ.

Mat Drake, ENZ’s IT Manager, outlines the challenge: “We had numerous shared drives that were named after most of the letters of the alphabet. The upshot of this was that people were doing their own thing. There were a lot of barriers to sharing and people working in silos. It was becoming impossible to find anything.”

ENZ Chief Financial Officer, Matt Penney, describes the opportunity this challenge presented: “We are a knowledge organisation with a strong customer focus. We needed to do more than just record and store our information. We needed a platform that would allow us to really use our information and get the most out of it.”

“We needed to do more than just record and store our information. We needed a platform that would allow us to really use our information and get the most out of it.”

“We needed to do more than just record and store our information. We needed a platform that would allow us to really use our information and get the most out of it.”

— Matt Penney, CFO, Education New Zealand

ENZ needed a solution that would:

Work from anywhere and with external education partners

Seamlessly integrate with its existing SharePoint intranet
Provide a future-proof platform that would help get the most from functionality in Office 365 and Dynamics 365
Allow people to find stuff – search was a really big one for us.”

As a relatively new organisation, ENZ had a “clean sheet of paper” and saw the opportunity to quickly establish a strong, integrated enterprise content management platform for the future, and worked with Intergen to implement Cohesion.

After a series of “well-structured sprints” spanning a total of four months, ENZ’s Cohesion platform was live and in use by its global team.

The Cohesion advantage

Cohesion is Empired and Intergen’s Microsoft-based, cloud-delivered ECM as a service offering, designed to help organisations communicate, collaborate and meet their records management requirements.

Cohesion was originally created for New Zealand government agencies as one of three offerings available through the New Zealand all-of government enterprise content management services panel, established in November 2013. Today, Cohesion has a strong and growing constituency of more than 7,000 users within New Zealand’s public sector and is now available to Australasian organisations across all sectors, offered on private, government and public clouds.

The benefits of committing to strong change and information management

“As a smaller organisation that doesn’t have dedicated information or change management expertise in-house, we were also particularly pleased to be able to access these services from Intergen,” Matt says.

“Having strong change and information management in place took the complexity out of the project for us and gave us best practice. It was the single biggest reason for the success of
the project.”

Hand in hand with this, training was key. “One of the best things we did was create a project team of super users within ENZ, and then draw on Intergen’s change and information management expertise to make sure we had the right level of support along the way.

“Getting critical mass, getting people to spread the message, getting extra training has all helped us drive to the finish much more quickly than we would have been able to otherwise. It has saved us a huge amount of time and effort in the long run.”