How to rethink your IS and working methods to move towards more collaboration, while raising the level of your data security? This is the question that the Occitanie region asked themselves at the time of their reorganization.
The Occitanie-Pyrénées-Méditerranée region, which brings together 13 departments over 72,724 km2, is the region of France investing the most for the life and future of their inhabitants. The 2019 budget is, in fact, marked by the affirmation of regional policies for mobility and sustainable development, equal opportunities, access to training and employment, economic development, a source of value and social progress.
A new idea of the document management
On the occasion of the merger of the ancient Languedoc-Roussillon and Midi-Pyrénées regions, the new Occitanie Region has therefore rethought their information system, and more particularly their document management. They were looking for a platform to unify the “documentary repositories” of the two ancient regions now merged (the ISs of Toulouse and Montpellier) to centralize information assets. They also wanted to replace file servers by gradually migrating documents to a collaborative DMS in order to control access to documents and their lifecycle.
An alternative to Office 365
This new solution should also facilitate cross-functional and collaborative work to increase efficiency, and above all constitute a convincing alternative to SharePoint / Office365, as well as to the existing DMS, based on Alfresco and used by one of the headquarters. It should also allow better control of both the IT budget and the IS with OnPremise hosting.
Towards an Open Source and sovereign solution
Last prequirement: this solution should be able to be deployed to all civil servants in the Region (nearly 3,000 users) and their partners (more than 1,000 external users to date). Finally, the region wanted to give priority to an Open Source and sovereign solution (See. Cloud Act USA), allowing it to save time in document management (research, sharing, activity monitoring, etc.), while reducing the number of errors (versions, duplicates, overwritten or deleted files, etc.). They finally opted for the GoFAST collaborative DMS platform.
Cross-functional document management
The deployment of GoFAST made it possible to respond to the main business requirements. Thanks, in particular, to the creation of collaborative spaces for cross-functional document management between directions, services, project teams, remote sites (especially between Montpellier and Toulouse) and external partners in the region. The solution also guarantees effective management of access rights to content, which can be dedicated to business managers (GDPR).
THE BENEFICIAL EFFECTS OF GOFAST
Many other positive effects have been observed including:
- the development of collaborative work and the co-editing of Office files with the integrated Open Source OnlyOffice office suite,
- the possibility of centralizing and securing exchanges to reduce emails and no longer send attachments,
- secure access to documents and all features via a simple web browser (mobility, telecommuting, etc.),
- the establishment of a knowledge base shared between all civil servants,
- "activity summary" notifications on content and associated exchanges which allow, unlike the file server, to follow the activity of their service and cross-functional projects to be monitored.
A PROXIMITY SOLUTION
By opting for GoFAST collaborative DMS, the Occitanie region has also avoided the deployment of certain so-called "GAFAM" solutions, thus protecting themselves from the Cloud Act, opaque pricing policies of large software publishers (eg: SharePoint / Office365) and more transparent reversibility . “Working with a sovereign software publisher provides significant advantages throughout the project: proximity, better understanding of business requirements, and consistency with political discourse for the promotion of French startups and SMEs rather than GAFAMs, and data control”, says Christopher Potter, President and Founder of CEO-Vision.
DEPLOYMENT AND CHANGE MANAGEMENT
This project also involved a gradual deployment and required the allocation of important resources for the change management. After s part of the shared file server was made read-only during the summer, at the end of the year there will be the migration of entire shared file servers to GoFAST. Eventually, GoFAST will replace all file servers.