Deloitte & Touche contracts Microsoft SA

Deloitte & Touche, one of the nation`s leading professional services firms, provides assurance and advisory, tax, and management consulting services. The company has 2 500 staff members based in more than nine South African cities. Known as an employer of choice for innovative human resources programmes, Deloitte & Touche was recognised as one of the "The Best Companies to work for in South Africa" by the Corporate Research Foundation in 2000.

Deloitte & Touche is the South African national practice of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu which is a Swiss Verein, and each of its national practices is a separate and independent legal entity. For more information, please visit www.deloitte.com.

As stated by Greg Roden, CKO for Deloitte & Touche Southern Africa: "As a professional services firm, we are in the business of dealing in knowledge. There is no debate that the knowledge we use and apply in providing solutions to our clients must be insightful, accurate, timely and readily available - and able to deliver significant benefit to our clients."

Deloitte & Touche needed a scalable content management solution to manage browser-based content that equipped staff members in the field with the information and knowledge they need to deliver superior client service efficiently and effectively.

In addition, the content management solution needed to integrate with the existing SharePoint Portal Server implementation at Deloitte & Touche, providing users with quick access to the appropriate document libraries within the enterprise. Management of the content also needed to be moved to those responsible for it, in place of the change request procedure that had been put in place before which gave rise to bottlenecks in content management.

Content Management Server (CMS) has empowered Deloitte & Touche to distribute content authoring across the organisation, while allowing the department that controls the site to maintain certain core content functions. Through CMS, Deloitte & Touche has also been able to realise the benefits of sharing content across multiple sections or pages within a site - without having to recreate pages as was previously the situation.

As the content management needs of the firm change and the volume of content delivered to staff in the field increases, CMS has delivered a platform that allows for this, while reducing the administration overhead of a site of this nature.

By leveraging the existing SharePoint implementation at Deloitte & Touche, intelligent searching and subscription functionality has been provided to the site.

* Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
* Microsoft Content Management Server 2002
* Microsoft SQL Server 2000
* Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server v1.0

* Server and 2 500+ users

Prior to the engagement, the client had deployed SharePoint Portal Server as its document management system. While administrators were able to create documents within the SharePoint repository, they were required to approve the documents for publication, which were then made available to all users. While the use of Digital Dashboard within SharePoint provides excellent access to the document management and searching facilities within the SharePoint platform, our client had an additional need around the enriching of the document-specific information that was available in SharePoint.

This need was resolved through the creation of a static HTML site, being authored by a member of the knowledge management team. Where appropriate, hyperlinks to documents within the SharePoint repository were created manually. Updating the content was also a manual process that was driven through a manual request form process.

As the content needs of our client became more complex, it became clear that the manual authoring of content on the site was not going to provide the results required for the organisation in the short-term. An alternative to an ever-expanding content management requirement needed to be sought.

Another need that had been dictated by users was the fact that it should be possible to use different paths within the site to reach the same content. For example, one user may require content driven off a business unit focus, whereas another user may require content driven off a toolset focus. Ultimately, the content served under both areas would be the same, but the navigation paths followed by users to get there would be totally different.

A review of internal activities within Deloitte & Touche also revealed the existence of business units and initiatives creating their own intranet sites without reference to common branding or standards. This study revealed the need to implement a scalable solution to achieve the objective of consolidating the various sites under a single content management framework. Thus reinforcing a common brand identity while allowing for individual initiatives to retain an element of self-identity.

The incorporation of a programmatically driven interface to the management of content was ideal for our client, because this allowed it to achieve several key objectives.

Firstly, the responsibility for the authoring of content could be distributed. In this way, the centralised administration and intervention required for the content to be updated could be done away with. Users who required the ability to change their content were empowered to do so and ownership for the content could be placed in the hands of the business where it belonged.

In addition to this, several processes that were previously manually driven could now be automated. For example, in several pages within the manual site, users needed to be presented with hyperlinks to documents resident within SharePoint. By developing programming within Content Management Server, the list of documents at a folder could be interrogated, and automatically displayed to the user, without the need for the manual creation of the hyperlinks to each document.

As a third objective, the client could automate the reference to the various elements of duplicated content. In the manually-driven site, for example, it became time-consuming to maintain when a contact person`s telephone number changed. Since the contact person`s details were displayed across the site, this was a lengthy update process. By making use of the functionality within Content Management Server, this was eliminated. Content of this nature was controlled centrally, and only needed to be updated once.

Mint worked very closely with the project team at Deloitte & Touche to map the current manual site to the capabilities of Content Management Server. After several planning iterations, this mapping, and the development, could be completed on schedule.

In approximately three months, a solid platform was created for Deloitte & Touche leveraging off the Content Management Server platform, a platform capable of extending its content delivery requirement in addition to reducing the time to market in delivering new initiatives / sub-sites.

Content Management Server is developed around client needs for the maintenance of richer, unstructured content, while retaining the ability to work with the content in a structured programming environment.

This has enabled the client to automate far more content delivery than was previously possible, in a shorter period of time.