Enterprise Content Management in Higher Education
Located in Montreal, Canada, Concordia University is an urban educational institution
serving 31,000 undergraduate and graduate students from across Canada and around
the world. By the mid-1990s, the Dean of Arts & Science noticed that the
amount of paperwork that had to be filed, stored, and retrieved in a timely
and cost-effective manner was beginning to overwhelm his administrative staff.
In response, the faculty deployed an enterprise content management (ECM) solution
for its 400 plus-member Faculty of Arts and Science and later expanded its use
to the Library, and to the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science (130
members). Following the success of this deployment, Documentum was chosen as
an ECM solution to facilitate and manage the university’s admissions process.
The Content Management Challenge
The dean’s office of Concordia University’s Faculty of Arts and
Science stores a vast amount of information about its faculty members, including
annual workload letters, contracts, performance reviews, and changes to curriculum
vitae (CV). With more than one million pages in the dossiers of its 400 plus
faculty members by the mid-1990s, the administrative staff was being overwhelmed
by paper.
Retrieving dossiers and then searching within these files — each of which
holds hundreds of pages — for the exact documents required to resolve
inquiries about everything from tenure starting dates to required workloads
took more than 1,500 employee hours per year and was also subject to human error.
The time expended on simple information retrieval and filing was so great that
staff members had little time to complete their other tasks.
Adding to the complexity of the content retrieval process was the fact that
faculty personnel records were often scattered across multiple offices, including
the dean’s office, the faculty personnel office, and the university human
resources office. With no central repository for faculty documents, staff members
did not know where to look first for the documents they needed or whether a
document they had was the most current version. Content retrieval was further
complicated by duplication of documents within each dossier. All of this had
a severe impact on productivity.
The Goal
It was clear that the volume of dossiers and documents would continue to increase
over time — as would the complexity of filing and retrieving the paperwork
needed to handle inquiries. To streamline these processes while freeing staff
members to perform their other assigned tasks, the university concluded that
it needed a way to store documents centrally and electronically by specific
attributes such as name and document type, including workload letter, contract,
CV, tenure letter, or general correspondence.
"We wanted to specify the document type and automatically retrieve all
of those documents for any department or any member of our faculty," says
Aaron Brauer, the Arts & Science Faculty’s Acting Director of Academic
Technology. "We wanted the ability to gain immediate access to the specific
piece of information we needed to resolve an inquiry in seconds, rather than
in the hours or days it took in a paper-based environment."
The Enterprise Content Management Solution
The faculty’s IT group knew it needed an enterprise content management
(ECM) solution, but the technicians did not have the expertise to design and
implement such a system themselves. Concordia turned for help to Xerox Global
Services, a worldwide consulting organization, and Documentum, the leading provider
of ECM and a division of EMC Corporation.
"Our new content management system not only reduces
our content retrieval time, but also improves information access and content
reliability. What used to take hours or days, now occurs in seconds, and we
know the information is accurate".
— Aaron Brauer, Acting Director of Academic Technology,
Concordia University
"Xerox Global Services brought to the project a vast array of experience
in dealing with document management in general and with Documentum ECM in particular,"
says Aaron Brauer. "Xerox designed and implemented a system whereby we
could convert paper to electronic form and then deposit this content into a
Documentum repository that could be queried easily."
Adds Mel Thompson, vice president and general manager, Xerox Global Services
Canada, "Xerox helped Concordia deploy a scalable document management solution
based on Documentum that increased knowledge-sharing efficiencies and reduced
tedious administrative functions."
Flexible Environment
With its ECM solution fully implemented, Concordia University’s Faculty
of Arts and Sciences no longer relies on paper records. "Even though we
generate paper, once it is scanned, it is immediately archived offsite,"
Brauer says. "So anytime a document is required, it is accessed electronically.
Even faculty members who want to review their own dossiers get their information
from the repository, accessing it from desktop PCs in our offices."
Fast Access, Attribute-Based Queries
The key benefits of Concordia's ECM solution include fast access to content
and the ability to query the repository on the basis of file attributes. Instead
of taking hours to figure out where a file is stored, then hours more to find
the dossier in file cabinets, and even more time to isolate the specific document,
the entire process is now completed in seconds with a few mouse clicks.
"Our ECM system not only reduces our content retrieval time, but also
improves information access and content reliability. What used to take hours
or days, now occurs in seconds, and we know the information is accurate,"
said Brauer.
