Implementing enterprise search and an EDRMS are high up the agenda in 2011 for David Sunderland, Director, Information Management, at the Fair Work Ombudsman.

The FWO is a new federal government body created by the Fair Work Act in July 2009 that combines the previous Workplace Authority and Workplace Ombudsman.

The FWO is charged with the practice of assessing and checking compliance while also conducting an ongoing education program for Australian workplace participants. It works out of 53 centres nationally with around 1000 staff.

Its sister organisation, Fair Work Australia, is the tribunal arm that among other things sets minimum wages and employment conditions and manages dispute resolution.

The FWO’s IT infrastructure and desktop and server platforms are provided by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, which is currently rolling out the Windows 7 desktop OS to replace XP together with an upgrade to Office 2007.

The workload is immense. Since July 2009, Fair Work Infoline advisers have spoken with more than 1.3 million employers and employees, including direct contact with around 250,000 to 350,000 small businesses.

It has created 11 Best Practice Guides dealing with a range of workplace matters such as work and family, small business, and managing underperformance, with 120,000 downloaded.

The Fair Work Ombudsman has also been busy creating template employment documentation and letters for use by small business. More than 360,000 were downloaded in the year to 30 June 2010. There were 170,000 downloads of the pay slips and leave record templates; 80,000 of the performance management templates; and 55,000 of the employment engagement templates.

Inspectors engaged by the States completed 18,000 educational visits with a target of 50,000 to be completed in the next two years.

Nationally, fair work inspectors finalised about 21,000 underpayment investigations last year, recovering more than $26 million for over 16,000 employees. About $4.9m of that was recovered from targeted compliance activities (which included around 3400 audits). The courts finalised 56 penalty matters, imposing fines of just over $2m.

A new case management system, Nexus, built using Microsoft Dynamics CRM has recently been developed to handle most of the functions of dealing with claims for underpayment, etc.

Most FWO staff save documents to a shared drive or an ageing document management system called 80/20 Document Manager, which was developed in Australia and now owned by SAI Global.

“You can provide document links to 8020 documents in email which is a popular way to share information internally.” said Sunderland.

“Search is a problem; we can’t look across the business system, shared drives and our existing document management system. That’s a real key delivery of the EDRMS, to implement true enterprise search across the various repositories that we have.

“We are looking at FAST search to be the solution; it looks like it’s ticking the boxes for functionality and integration.”

DEEWR is in the process of implementing Enterprise Vault for Exchange email archiving, however records management for the FWO involves printing out emails and storing them as paper files, with TRIM as the record-keeping system..

“Our new claims system has more automated links to TRIM, which is our record-keeping system for paper records, and we are actively looking at TRIM as being part of our EDRMS solution. TRIM has a real records focus so is not suitable for our general users to use for their daily document or records management activities”.

FWO is instead planning to explore the use of SharePoint for document management and has recently upgraded its intranet with SharePoint 2007. Both the Workplace Ombudsman and the Workplace Authority had separate SharePoint 2003 intranets, but they had not been used for document management.

“The change to SharePoint 2007 was reasonably rudimentary, there wasn’t a whole lot of rebuilding or redesigning required. There is a project underway now to recast the intranet into a SharePoint 2010 environment with a more fundamental review of how everything operates.

“We want it to be as automated and as rules-driven as possible and we are hoping TRIM 7 and SharePoint 2010 together with FAST search will deliver us that.

“It is really important to us that record-keeping is done well but as much as possible is transparent to users.” said Sunderland.