Kainos Wins Strategic SharePoint 2010 EDRM Project at Northern Ireland Tourist Board
- Drive to reduce reliance on paper will enable NITB to meet Department targets for responses to Ministerial information requests, and cut time-consuming admin -
London & Belfast, July 26th, 2010 – Kainos, (www.kainos.com), a leading electronic document and records management (EDRM) solutions specialist, has announced another prestigious public sector win, this time with the Northern Ireland Tourist Board (NITB).
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The NITB is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment Northern Ireland. As well as promoting Northern Ireland as a tourist destination, it advises and provides critical information to the Department to support policy-making.
Under the new contract, signed in the last few weeks, Kainos will implement a comprehensive EDRM solution for the NITB based on the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 platform. This will transform the flow of critical, timely information around the organisation, vastly reducing the reliance on paper, and enabling the Tourist Board to meet tight Departmental targets.
“We get European funding, and have to provide a strict information audit trail as part of our obligations, but we have got to a point where we are drowning in paper,” explains Louise Kearney, Director of Organisational Development at the NITB. “Stakeholder engagement and the visitor experience is the core of what we do, yet so much time is being wasted trying to track down the right version of any given document so we can provide timely answers to Assembly questions.”
A significant project for the NITB at the moment is the Titanic Signature Building, a new visitor centre. If the Departmental Minister is called to attend a meeting on this, his first port of call will be the NITB for an update on the project.
“Our target is 95% success in providing such correspondence to the Minister on time,” Louise notes. “Meeting this requirement is challenging with current systems.”
During the tender process, the NITB quickly realised that Kainos was the only provider with the right set of skills and experience to take on the job. The NITB was already using an earlier version of Microsoft SharePoint (2007) for basic office applications, and wanted to protect this investment. Kainos confirmed that an EDRM solution with SharePoint 2010 at its core would enable full document automation, powerful search and rapid access, as well as flexible collaboration.
“Assembly questions for the Executive can be very random, and could involve any of our five divisions and any activity,” Louise explains. “Co-ordinating a response could require documents from across the organisation. Once the new solution is up and running, this will be possible without relying on particular individuals being in the office to locate the files.”
The new EDRM solution is due to go live in October. “We are very confident that Kainos will deliver quickly,” Louise concludes. “They have an in-depth knowledge of SharePoint 2010, a strong project management discipline, and a wealth of experience in the public sector, which makes them ideally placed for this project. They also conducted a comprehensive workshop at the outset, to ensure that everyone was clear on the requirements and the brief from the start.”
Commenting on the win, Brendan Mooney, CEO at Kainos, said, “We’re delighted that Kainos has been chosen for this critical project. It’s a further endorsement of our expertise and experience in EDRM, which many organisations now see as a cornerstone of their strategy to cut costs, increase productivity and drive up the customer experience, particularly in the current climate where budgets are so tight and the pressure to reduce overheads is so great.”
About Kainos
Kainos is an independent IT consultancy and systems integrator which specialises in implementing solutions that make businesses perform better. The company was founded in 1986 and is headquartered in Belfast with offices in Dublin, London and Gdansk. Kainos employs over 220 consultants and prides itself on the quality of its people. Kainos’s customers include some of the biggest names in both private and public sector throughout the UK and Ireland, including AIB, the Audit Commission, Shipowners, Bank of Ireland, Aviva, Northern Ireland Civil Service, the Information Commissioners Office and permanent tsb. For more information, visit www.kainos.com.
About Northern Ireland Tourist Board
The Northern Ireland Tourist Board (NITB) is a non-departmental public body of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment Northern Ireland, responsible for the promotion of Northern Ireland as a tourist destination. It also advises the Department on the formulation and implementation of policy relating to the development of tourism, and interacts with other government departments, within the tourism industry in Northern Ireland and with its counterparts elsewhere in the UK and in the Republic of Ireland. For more information visit www.nitb.com.
