City of Gosnells has taken up the information challenge and asked iFerret to search out all relevant documents across a dataset and improve efficiency in that process.
Making best use of his time at the airport before boarding a Friday afternoon flight, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the City of Gosnells in Perth’s south-east asked his staff to action an information request from the Western Australian Ombudsman.
Like most modern councils City of Gosnells deploys a variety of information systems to support business initiatives and client requirements.
This creates great challenges as they generally do not have the capability to search and discover information across the organisation, relative to a given need.
If staff want to attempt a thorough search or investigation it can be time-consuming, resource hungry and costly, and at times they will not find all the information needed. This is a concern in terms of the City’s risk management.
Just a half an hour after making the request, the CEO received a spreadsheet detailing the documents which would satisfy his request: a year’s worth of correspondence related to one case which was contained in 550 documents drawn from across the spectrum of the City’s information systems.
For the City’s Information Management Services Coordinator, Kevin Barnett, who undertook the process, it was a pleasing result.
To satisfy the request, he had used iFerret, the solution for undertaking structured and unstructured searches of all forms of local government information repositories.
iFerret is a “turnkey” solution which is delivered to be fully operational with little effort required by the customer who simply needs to provide ‘read only’ access to the systems to be included in the search.
Council now makes better use of corporate information and can be assured that enquiries are returning holistic, accurate and up to date results.
*Copy supplied by iPlatinum
