An enterprise search solution heralds many potential benefits but Queensland’s Ipswich City Council says its implementation of iFerret also highlights the importance of security, both across the enterprise and within source systems.
While Queensland’s oldest provincial city has been making a name for itself – as one of the world’s top 7 most intelligent communities for the way it is mapping out its digital future – its Council was facing more prosaic information systems challenges.
These challenges include the search of information assets across multiple corporate systems and network drives to assist with “Right to Information” (RTI) requests, identification of data quality issues (such as duplicate documents) in information assets which had to be addressed prior to introduction of a new EDRMS system and the need to provide a single view of each customer across multiple customer systems.
Cr Paul Tully, Chair of the Information and Technology Board, advised “After an extensive evaluation of solutions, including global brands, locally developed iFerret was chosen as the best option for the Council to undertake structured and unstructured searches of its various information repositories.”
Ipswich is the first Council to implement iFerret in Queensland and it joins a rapidly growing user community.
The strategy is to implement iFerret gradually, initially limiting it to a small number of people and using production data to ensure security on documents and network drives is correct.
Access to the system was limited to less than 20 people with testing continuing to ensure that unexpected outcomes would not occur as access to iFerret was broadened to other Council staff.
The pilot project required iFerret to:
- confirm the consistency and relevance of the search results it generated
- provide quantitative and qualitative analysis of data available in Council’s applications
- assess the quality of data stored in key repositories
- assess search effectiveness and efficiency
- identify organisational impacts of implementing an enterprise search solution
Test cases were developed for completion by pilot participants with a score given to the application. These scores were entered into a pilot evaluation report which was reviewed and approved through Council’s governance framework.
iFerret is now enabling documents to be located in a matter of seconds, when previously they may not have been found or it would have taken a long time to find them.
As part of its assessment Council looked at the use of conventional search engines, only to conclude they were not as feature-rich as iFerret and that they were much more expensive.
The Council’s business case for a search solution itemised nine functions against which potential suppliers were evaluated including information search, results filtering, preview and thumbnails including contextual, autocomplete of search criteria, duplicate document identification, security controls from the native application, exporting of results sets, sorting of results sets and indexing of information repositories.
iFerret was used to identify the existence of duplicate information but not to remove it. A manual process will be used to determine which duplicates can be removed with iFerret reporting being used to confirm the reduction in duplicate records.
The project team confirmed the consistency and relevance of the search results by testing the information generated by iFerret against that held in the source repository.
iFerret is simple and straightforward to use, much like a Google search. As a result no formal training course has been needed. However hints and tips guides are being developed as reference documents for future users.
Council have found the vendor of the product, iPLATINUM, to be extremely helpful and responsive to requests for enhancements and clarification of queries experienced during the implementation.
Cr Paul Tully, Chair of the Information and Technology Board, identified that “Improved access to documents, improved information on data quality in current systems and the ability to identify duplicate documents, underscored by major time savings, already lead a list of benefits starting to flow at Ipswich.”
While the ultimate number of users of iFerret is yet to be determined the initial focus is on corporate applications. The next step is to bed down the system and consider other applications where there is deemed to be sufficient value for indexing the application, extending the contribution of iFerret in providing Council services.
