University of Southern Queensland

Rapid response to COVID-19 remote working requirement

As other organizations around the world, the university had to rapidly respond to a very different way of working when COVID-19 hit in 2020. It accelerated the adoption of the Ivanti IT automation platform, designed to streamline remote working through online forms and workflows. Kaye England, Manager, Enterprise Information Management Services (EIMS), explains further: “The platform is internally branded as ServiceHub and provides paperless cross-team access to a fully digital environment with searchability and central access to our policy manuals and forms. This was particularly helpful in getting our human resources (HR) colleagues up and running remotely quickly. However, we soon realized that Ivanti was not meeting our legislative recordkeeping compliance requirements in how content was managed from a retention and access perspective.”

Most HR documents need to be retained for 80 years and for this purpose the university implemented Content Manager many years ago. Any high risk and high value documents are safely managed in this trusted system that has been finetuned over time. Content Manager integrates with the Peoplesoft HR system with employee folders created hourly through an API connection. This means that HR staff can start their employee recordkeeping within just hours of a new employee joining the university.

The integration between ServiceHub and Content Manager is a significant process improvement for the HR and EIMS teams. It was crucial to the rapid ability of staff to work remotely in response to the COVID-19 crisis and it has capably supported a highly distributed workforce reliant on digital workflow.

Content manager for seamless recordkeeping

An integration between ServiceHub and Content Manager was essential as the HR team wasted precious time manually saving task summaries in ServiceHub together with any attachments to their computer so that they could then send it to Content Manager for safekeeping. Metadata on these manually exported records was often inconsistent due to human error, making it difficult to find the records. In addition, every ServiceHub record created in Content Manager needed a unique ID for audit and reporting purposes.

“Staff from the infrastructure services team at UniSQ and the ServiceHub team worked together to extract the information from ServiceHub,” comments Kaye. “These records were exported in HTML and PDF format and integrated into the relevant employee file in Content Manager. The process to integrate ServiceHub with Content Manager required custom coding so that subfolders are automatically created in Content Manager once a case is finalized. This resulted in an API that maps ServiceHub export settings exactly to Content Manager. We also created an additional Content Manager field for the unique ServiceHub record ID.”

All records flowing from ServiceHub to Content Manager are visibly marked to show that they are integrated. If the workflow fails for some reason, the document is sent to an exceptions folder so that staff can manually finish the process. This great collaboration between different teams ticks all the boxes for UniSQ's recordkeeping obligations. It also fits well with the EIMS strategy of making recordkeeping seamless and in the background, ensuring a simple and effective process for the end user.

Significant cost savings while meeting all compliance requirements

The IT teams had the opportunity to increase their Content Manager knowledge during the integration project. Naomi Lutvey, Director of Client Services for UniSQ is pleased with the result: “This integration will ensure that all high value, high risk records created in ServiceHub are consistently captured in Content Manager. Having this capability ensures that ServiceHub will continue to develop and meet user demands, safe in the knowledge that all content is managed according to our compliance requirements.”

Kaye comments on benefits achieved: “Today, we file our working documents neatly in Content Manager once the request is completed, whereas previously these documents were filed individually. We now automatically export close to more than 10,000 documents each year which translates to a tangible cost saving of thousands of dollars. Consistent metadata and naming conventions are applied automatically, and this means records are found quickly and efficiently.”

Regular audits, using the unique ServiceHub ID field, are carried out in minutes, compared to hours, or even days previously. The ServiceHub team works continuously on improving the code so that it can be used for more record types and workflows between ServiceHub and Content Manager, always ensuring to meet legislative obligations as well as making recordkeeping seamless for end users.

Andrew Williams, Associate Director of People Services at UniSQ concludes: “The integration between ServiceHub and Content Manager is a significant process improvement for the HR and EIMS teams. It was crucial to the rapid ability of staff to work remotely in response to the COVID-19 crisis and it has capably supported a highly distributed workforce reliant on digital workflow.”

Today, we file our working documents neatly in Content Manager once the request is completed, whereas previously these documents were filed individually. We now automatically export close to 8,000 documents each year which translates to a tangible cost saving of thousands of dollars.