Standards Australia
Background
Standards Australia is Australia’s peak non-government standards body. It develops and maintains around 7000 Australian Standards® and related publications. These documents are prepared by over 1500 committees involving more than 8000 committee members. Standards Australia also provides input into approximately 18,000 International Standards by ISO and IEC. Standards Australia facilitates the development of new Australian Standards® using a process based on consensus among stakeholder groups, including:
- Governments
- Industry Bodies
- Trade and Professional Associations
- Consumer Groups
- Academia
The Business Challenge
Although Standards Australia was one of the first organisations of its type to develop online delivery of technical and business standards, it still took two to three years to develop a new Australian Standard®. A group of designers and editors were working across multiple projects. But without a centralised system to handle their workflow, they didn’t know:
- Who was doing what
- Who was overloaded?
- Who had time to take on more work?
The Solution
To develop each new standard, both staff and volunteer-based committees need to use and share documents thousands of times. Immersive helped Standards Australia to identify, streamline and automate and to improve the efficiency and accuracy of its document handling around key business processes.
Results Achieved
The client’s major business activity – developing new Australian Standards® – now takes months instead of years.
Immersive Achieved This By:
- Improving the Efficiency of the Standards Development Process
- Automating and Improving Work Collaboration
- Reducing the Time and Resource Requirements
Immersive set out to improve the standards development process and to reduce the time and resources needed. To do this, we had to develop a centralised system that:
- Provided Clear Task and Resource Allocation
(Eliminating confusion over who was doing what, when, and with what resources) - Eliminated Time Wasted Searching for Resources (Where is the document I need?)
- Improved Document Integrity (Is the document I’m using now the right version?)
Business Challenge 1 – Synchronising Document [data] Integrity with Task Allocation
Document integrity – making sure that documents matched the tasks they were meant for – was a key challenge.
Everyone involved in developing new Australian Standards® was using a shared network drive for sharing and storing documents. If you use a physical piece of paper, only one person can change it at a time. But with documents stored on a shared network drive without access permissions, the people collaborating on that project were in effect ‘working on the same piece of paper’ in an uncontrolled manner. The issue of ‘who had access to what and when’ was not controlled, since there was no version control built into the system. You don’t want a document that you are working to be changed by another person without any notification. But as people were free to create their own document versions, it was sometimes hard for people to know if they were working on the right version of a document.
Business Challenge 2 – Workflow and Task Management
When working on a new Australian Standard®, people needed to receive access the necessary documents at the same time, received a task allocation and they needed to be certain that they were working on the right documents.
With its workflow-oriented system, Standards Australia placed a lot of emphasis on creating tasks and allocating tasks to different people. But within that system, a task allocation was just an instruction to do something. It didn’t link the user to the necessary resources to accomplish that task. The actual resources which people at Standard Australia needed to complete their tasks were the documents themselves. But since people had to scour the shared network drive for the right document to use for a task, finding the right document was time consuming, and people couldn’t be sure that they had found the right document.
Business Challenge 3 – Bringing Two Systems Together While Maintaining Performance
People at Standards Australia didn’t actually control their existing database as the database was with their publisher. Standards Australia had two different data stores that were linked to one common interface. One system kept track of documents, and the other kept track of tasks allocated to people. Immersive had to help these systems work together so that people could find the necessary documents to complete their tasks. Each business function needed to operate cohesively regardless of the data source, and Immersive set out to help the organisation integrate these disparate systems while ensuring cohesive performance across each business function.
A Breakthrough Solution Using a Visual Process Design Engine
The opportunity was for Immersive to equip Standards Australia with a new model for streamlining and automating their business processes – a new way of working through understanding their business. Immersive developed an improved workflow for Standards Australia by integrating both open source and proprietary software products.
We used Livelink ECM as a document management platform, and used jBPM (java Business Process Management) open source workflow to build an application on top of Livelink ECM which extended its capabilities to match the client’s business processes.
Immersive now has a visual design tool which helps us automate our clients’ business processes; almost like a set of Lego blocks for developing business rules and processes. This visual design tool helps make the design process more concrete for Immersive’s clients. Clients can participate more effectively in the design process by looking at the process diagrams we create together. Relatively widely used for systems that involve business process management, jBPM allows Immersive to create business processes that coordinate people, applications, and services more effectively. It allows us to bring process automation a wider variety of business processes, and to help streamline them.
They just have to look at the diagrams to gain insight into the design process. It easier to communicate with clients because they can actually see how tasks are flowing, and they can see who’s doing what. But jBPM creates more than just diagrams. What makes it such an effective tool is that while we create visual business process diagrams in the foreground, jBPM creates XML code in the background to represent the ‘backbone’ of business process rules. Although we have to fill in a lot more code afterwards, the visual design tool speeds up programming and makes the whole development process easier and more effective. The whole model is basically an XML document. You can edit the XML directly if you want to, or you can use the visual tool to edit it. It’s easy to use the diagrams generated to help a client understand the process. Then you can use that exact same model in the code.
Results
Immersive has helped Standards Australia cut the time for developing new Australian Standards® from years to months. The system we built has achieved this by:
- Improving Workflow
- Improving communication between committees and groups
- Providing clear task and resource allocation
(Eliminating confusion over who was doing what when, and with what resources)
- Eliminating time wasted searching for resources (Where is the document I need?) - Improved document integrity (Is this the document I’m using the right version?)
Users now only see the documents they need to see, and only work on the document versions that they need to work on. They don’t have to go into searching through network file folders any more. When users receive a task allocation, such as to edit a certain section of a document, they no longer have to hunt for anything. They just have to click on the attachment, open it, edit it, save it, and then that’s the end of that task.
Conclusion
Immersive has understood the processes used by Standard Australia, and we’ve focused on the key parts of those processes to more effectively automate and improve them. By doing this, Immersive has helped Standards Australia to cut the time for developing new Australian Standards® from years to months.
Our approach is to help the client to explore their own business challenges. We take the time to immerse ourselves in the landscape of the client’s industry, before drilling down to examine the systems and processes they use. We gain an understanding of how they perceive their business challenges. We then lead clients in understanding their challenges from a technical point of view, and help to educate them as to the possible solutions.
Clients use their own vocabulary to describe both their big-picture industry landscape and to try to define the specific problems that they face. They may be aware of some IT and business process issues, yet not be able to fully articulate them. Immersive often detects technical challenges of which a client was not fully aware. But to make sure we have the same understanding of the challenges that need to be solved, we start by developing a shared vocabulary with the client before creating solutions.
In this instance, Standards Australia had an overall idea of what needed to be done, but needed assistance in seeing the big picture, and in designing specific solutions. The biggest challenge initially was to understand exactly what the clients were doing in terms of business processes. The Immersive team analysed concrete examples of what Standards Australia was doing in order to understand where the challenges lay. Once we had established a shared vocabulary, we had a foundation for communicating exactly what our clients were doing and for envisaging what needed to be done. We then architected a solution that was grounded in a shared understanding of the issues.