The Ontario Ministry of Education (EDU) is divided into divisions, branches and different units. Due to the nature of these operating procedures the employees were experiencing constant changes in tasks, job positions and reporting relationships. There is a need for the employees to feel as one and function as a ministry with modest limitations. EDU has to take the tacit knowledge and turn it into explicit knowledge. As Kathryn Everest, I would recommend the EDU implement a document management system. In doing so, it will help the employees to work mutually as a company rather then a department. Having the employees to feel they are all part of a company rather than a department will help build trust amongst all employees. Less time will be spent locating documents; this alone will drastically reduce cost. Once the implementation is complete, I anticipate that employees will be able to locate quality information more quickly, therefore increasing efficiency and resulting in better customer satisfaction. Implementing a document management control system will also improve security by providing better, more flexible control over sensitive documents. The system will provide an audit trail of persons viewing / editing documents and the time of the occurrences.
Key Assumption
Since the EDU has decided to sole-source from IBM, I am making the assumption that my recommendation will be accepted.
Statement of Issues
The main issue in this case is the erroneous storage of the electronic data that’s available resulting in a lack of knowledge being shared amongst employees and a difficulty for one to amass internal knowledge. The case states that the same document is stored on multiple computer hard drives and there were often up to 20 different versions of that document. There are an estimated 3 million different documents on the EDU’s hard drives and in certain cases there are up to 20 different versions. This could potentially reveal