Customs looks to ease FOI pain

To get a better handle on the increasing amount of Freedom of Information requests, Australian Customs and Border protection has signed up Objective to provide content management for the agency over the next three years in a deal worth $5 million.

Tony Walls
(Credit: Objective)

The three-year agreement that has the option to be extended for up to nine years will see Objective provide Customs with its enterprise content management platform, Objective ECM 8, for use by the agency's 5000 staff.

Objective CEO Tony Walls told ZDNet Australia that in order to comply with the law, government agencies like Customs needed strong document management systems to keep track of everything.

"The national Archive Act ... basically says that if you create a document, then based on what that document actually is, you need to retain it, you need to secure it, you need to retain the different versions of it and ultimately you need to be able to discover it if you're subject to a ministerial request or a freedom of information request," he said.

"One of the biggest fears with an FOI request is 'did I get all the information?'. The second one is 'what information sources do we have?'," he added.

Moving to an enterprise content management system gives government agencies a "single source of truth" they can work from and ensure they have all the documents at their fingertips.

"Because we've got a single source of truth with a very high-powered search engine available within it, we can be sure that when we do an FOI request that the discovery process is quite complete."

He said while many government departments adopted content management systems to comply with the law, after a while many couldn't live without it.

"A lot of them start from a compliance perspective, but if you went and revisited a customer three years on, you would find they can't live without them from an efficiency perspective," he said.