Te Puni Kōkiri

• Thousands of digital records to manage in accordance with stringent legal requirements
• On-premises IT infrastructure for records management was time-consuming and costly to manage
• Limited ability to restore data quickly in the event of a disaster recovery scenario

Te Puni Kōkiri is the government of New Zealand’s principal policy advisor on Māori wellbeing and development. Established in its current form in 1992, the organization engages with Māori communities across the country, and represents their interests to government ministers.

Stuart Gregory, chief information officer at Te Puni Kōkiri, said, “From an operational perspective, we work where the Māori population is. We have 17 regional offices across the country. Our face-to-face engagement with these communities directly informs the advice we provide to the government.”

Information management is a key enabler of Te Puni Kōkiri’s mission. As well as supporting back-office activities such as human resources and administration, employees rely on the organization’s content management platform to save notes from meetings with Māori communities, draft policy recommendations, and more.

Gregory continued, “We have a vast holding of records, from ordinary administrative materials to priceless historical documents. In Māori culture, there is a strong tradition that knowing the past gives us strength in the present. As a result, it is crucial for Te Puni Kōkiri to be a trusted custodian of records.”

Alongside its paper records, Te Puni Kōkiri manages a large volume of digital documents, which were previously stored in an on-premises data center near to Te Puni Kōkiri’s headquarters. 

“For almost a decade, OpenText Extended ECM has been Te Puni Kōkiri’s system of record for anything covered by our information management standards,” explained Gregory. “The OpenText solution plays a vital role in meeting legal requirements such as the Public Records Act 2005 and Official Information Act 1982, which set out how we must handle information and make it available to the public on request. Every day, around 350 of our 450 employees use the solution to drive their work.”

Te Puni Kōkiri is continually looking for ways to enhance its services. As part of a long-term information management transformation, the organization looked for a way to bring its enterprise content management (ECM) capabilities to the cloud.

“We saw that moving to cloud would bring a range of benefits,” said Gregory. “As well as mitigating the risk of unplanned downtime for ECM capabilities because of a data center outage, the cloud would allow us to decommission our legacy infrastructure—saving costs, cutting power consumption, and shrinking our carbon footprint. In addition, we could free our IT team from time-consuming management activities, enabling them to focus on the transformation effort.”