Agencies keen on document management
Government departments are speedily adopting electronic content and document management systems in Australia, with the latest two to follow the trend being the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and the Future Fund Management Agency.
Both organisations yesterday released tender documents notifying IT suppliers that they were interested in soon implementing such a system.
Other public bodies recently revealed to be putting in content management systems include Townsville Port, the Australian War Memorial, Western Australia Police and Legal Aid Western Australia.
In tender documents, the Future Fund said the implementation of an electronic document management system (EDMS) was seen as an important component of establishing its business after it commenced operations in its Melbourne office in April this year.
"Given the agency has been newly created and is expecting a rapid increase in staff and workloads, the implementation of a business solution for document and records management in a short timeframe is necessary," the documents said.
The Future Fund wants an "off the shelf" solution for its 100 concurrent users. The agency noted it had recently implemented a new Microsoft-based ICT environment using Windows Server 2003, Office 2003 and the SQL Server database.
ASIC's own document management needs are somewhat greater than those of the Future Fund. The agency's IT department is based in Sydney.
"ASIC seeks to acquire an enterprise content management (ECM) product that will provide a platform for growth while replacing some of its existing ageing applications for its approximately 1500 users spread across Australia," the financial regulator said in expression of interest documents.
"The ECM is intended to replace existing mainframe applications like DocImage (image repository that contains both images and their metadata), Lotus Notes, IBM MQ series and the data warehouse."
ASIC considered ECM as an amalgamation of a number of distinct but related applications relating to enterprise document management, web content management, document composition, enterprise records management, workflow and content capture and search.
Both agencies will begin evaluating responses to their respective information notices to the industry when they stop taking submissions in mid-November.