2005 C.I.P.A. Winners

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Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada

Executive Correspondence Management System

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) is a federal department with 6,500 employees and a $2.3-billion budget for fiscal 2005-06. For years, AAFC had been dissatisfied with its system for tracking of e-mails and other correspondence, called the Correspondence Tracking and Briefing System (CTBS). The fundamental flaw was that CTBS functioned separately from AgriDOC, the department's implementation of the Government of Canada's Records, Document and Information Management System (RDIMS). Every other federal department's correspondence-tracking system was similarly flawed.

The correspondence in question concerns matters requiring a response from the minister or deputy minister. Among other sources, it can come from the media, the public, associations and elsewhere in the government.

Challenges

In 2003, the vendor announced that it was ceasing to support the CTBS system. The search for a replacement found nothing on the market that met AAFC's requirements, and senior management decided that the department should develop an executive correspondence-tracking system of its own. The department's IM Utilities group was asked to lead the effort to conceive and implement it. In the past, other departments had built their own systems, but none of these could be integrated with their equivalents of AgriDoc.

Objectives

The goal was an integrated system that managed all electronic documents, including correspondence, and was fully compatible with AAFC's operating, database and e-mail systems, as well as its word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation software.

The first step was to ask the CTBS users what they needed. Their answer was clear: a system that was simple, flexible and functional. With this in mind, the project group studied all the latest technology and, says Jeff Lamirande, the assistant director of IM Utilities, "We found that there was now a whole new tool set, which would enable us to the job at a reasonable price."

Solutions

The end result of the group's research and labour is the Executive Correspondence Management System (ECMS). Founded upon a single, uniform classification scheme and seamlessly integrated with AgriDoc, it tracks incoming correspondence, using common business rules for records and document control. Its functions also include routing audit trails, fast look-up tables and security.

ECMS was developed early in 2003, and just when it was about to be tested, the crisis in the cattle industry over mad-cow disease erupted.

"In a two-week period, ministerial correspondence rose by 300 per cent," Lamirande says. "We had to make a few adjustments to handle the rapid increase, but ECMS responded as it was supposed to."

Innovative Use of Technology

The project team's initial technology review had revealed that the tools they needed were to be found within RDIMS/AgriDOC's general records and document-management processes. These enabled them to devise a way to build a pseudo-custom application, which comprised existing tools within the federal government's system tailored to a context-specific business solution. This approach made use of an existing investment and tied a specific business solution into the same baseline tools that the rest of the department would use for every-day records and document management.

ECMS was built with elements of AAFC's existing hardware and the AgriDOC platform. The platform is provided to the federal government by CGI, as systems integrator, and Hummingbird, as vendor. CGI also worked on the development and deployment of ECMS.

As well as saving the annual CTBS maintenance costs, ECMS will also cut an estimated 20 per cent from filing and retrieving costs; 30 per cent from document storage costs and 20 per cent from document approval and review costs. And that's just the start. The basic ECMS building blocks are now being applied elsewhere at AAFC.

"For instance, we've built a system to manage our intellectual property agreements with industry and research universities," Lamirande says, "and we're now building one to manage our procurement and contractual process."

Moreover, the technology and savings are being applied across the federal government. As Lamirande explains: "Our central agency, Public Works and Government Services Canada, is now a partner in our development projects, the idea being to make the results available to other departments. It saves them a lot of money, because they don't have to reinvent the wheel."

A 2005 CIPA Winner!

For its exceptional and innovative application of information technology to solve real-world business problems and bring greater benefit to all its stakeholders, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada has been awarded a Silver Award of Excellence from the 2005 Canadian Information Productivity Awards in the Efficiency and Operational Improvements Not For Profit category.

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