Partille Municipality Streamlines 1.6 Million Documents and Boosts Communication with New Intranet

"We have improved document processes and control by migrating our Document Management System to Omnia, making it a lot easier for employees to find, edit and collaborate on documents", says Lovisa Åblad, Digital Strategist at Partille Municipality.

"In fact, the new intranet offers hugely improved findability compared with the previous platform. No one needs to ask us any longer where they can find information since the navigation interface and search filters help users locate whatever they are looking for in no time at all. The intranet also today contains more relevant and updated information and it’s so much easier to find collaboration spaces. These improvements have without a doubt encouraged usage of the intranet and boosted our internal communications"

Nearly 3000 people work at Partille Municipality, a suburban area of Gothenburg. The majority of employees work in the areas of education, health, and elderly care. The organization consists of five administrations: The Building and Environment Administration, the Culture and Leisure Administration, the Social and Labor Administration, the Education Administration, and the Health and Care Administration. There is also the Municipal Board-Administration where Lovisa and her colleagues work on an overall level in IT, Finance, HR, Community Development, and Communications.

The Municipality’s former intranet was based on Episerver. When the management team decided to implement Microsoft 365, they recognized that the intranet platform needed an upgrade.

"What we needed was a platform offering seamless and efficient integration to Microsoft 365. Omnia stood out among its competitors as the best-integrated platform", Lovisa explains.

The transition from Episerver to Omnia took place in 2017, one year before Lovisa started to work at the Municipality. When she assumed responsibility for the intranet project and the digital workplace, a fresh review of the information management and internal communications structures was initiated.

"Our employees experienced difficulties finding information, documents, and collaboration spaces in the Municipality’s various channels and systems. They also complained about the performance of the digital workplace and its accessibility to various digital tools. We accordingly acted on these complaints and conducted a thorough study clarifying and analyzing needs, processes, solutions, and information structures. For instance, a risk analysis of our Document Management System was carried out in order to measure its effectiveness and flaws, a study that showed that the existing solution was very much in need of reform", Lovisa concludes.

As a result of this review, Partille Municipality decided to migrate most of its document management to Omnia and to upgrade Omnia to the latest version.

In conjunction with the platform upgrade, the Municipality made significant changes to the intranet’s structure, functionality, navigation, and layout. In order to identify user behavior and information needs, Lovisa and her team carried out several user studies.

"We defined the Personas for every user category so as to be able to furnish the intranet with tailored functionality and content. Another method we used was Top Ten Tasks, mapping which content users can easily find and which content is hard for them to locate. Focusing on the user’s work assignments, the method is based on the question What performance is expected of me and what do I need to execute my tasks?. It was a very efficient method and helped us tremendously in creating the right structure, interface, and content", Lovisa underlines.

The new intranet was launched in the autumn of 2020 and was well received by the organization. Users especially appreciate its improved structure, content relevance, and layout, and today find it much easier to navigate and find information on the intranet.

"One of the main reasons employees previously experienced difficulties in locating information was that a great deal of information could only be found in other systems – for instance, information relating to the individual employee. The new intranet, however, contains all the relevant information employees need on a regular basis. And, with Omnia’s search filters, they can find it quickly and effortlessly. It’s also a lot more obvious to each employee what content is relevant to him or her as every piece of information is tagged and targeted", Lovisa points out.

In order to migrate the Document Management System to Omnia, Partille Municipality has undertaken extensive work in refining, restructuring, and categorizing documents. Their archives stored some 1.6 million documents when they started the migration process and every file needs to be analyzed, validated, tagged, and allocated to the right owner.

"We migrate one administration at a time. It’s a very time-consuming process, but with a streamlined and well-structured Document Management System we will both save time and boost our productivity and the reliability of our documents", Lovisa concludes.