Oregon State - Case Study

Case Summary
Oregon Employment Department
Salem, Ore.
Services: State agency that employs 1,300 people to assist residents with job placement, administers unemployment benefits to qualified residents, and collects unemployment insurance tax from employers throughout the state.
Critical needs: Content management. Ease of use by both non-technical staff and system administrators. Search and retrieval functions.
"The Stellent Content Management system has enabled employees to quickly access information that is critical to their work. As a result, we've accelerated our agency's decision-making process on employment issues that significantly impact workers and employers across the state." - Bill Rickman, Internet administrator for the Oregon Employment Department

Background
The staff of the Oregon Employment Department is inundated with government memos and forms that outline procedures for working on employment issues. Agency employees experienced years of frustration trying to efficiently create, access and manage this large amount of disparate information they needed to perform their jobs. They spent hours searching through thousands of binders, manuals and file cabinets for content. When information was outdated and needed to be revised, employees had to make edits and distribute updated paper copies to other agency employees across the state.

The agency needed to find a way to empower its employees to take charge of its organizational content. It decided an employee intranet was the best solution and selected the Stellent Content Management system to power its site.

"Stellent Content Management is easy for our employees to use, allowing them to more effectively perform their jobs," said Bill Rickman, Internet administrator for the Oregon Employment Department. "Employees no longer spend time tracking down information or manually updating and distributing paper copies."

How the Oregon Employment Department's Intranet Works
The Stellent Content Management system is the backbone of the Oregon Employment Department's intranet. It enables the agency to store all information in a centralized, Web-based location where it can be easily created and managed in its native format. Before implementing Stellent Content Management, employees routed all content through a Webmaster who was responsible for coding and updating all information for the site. Now, employees can use their Web browsers to contribute content directly to the Stellent Content Server from whatever application in which it was originally created.

Currently, there are more than 100 agency employees contributing content to the intranet through the Stellent Content Management system. New contributors are added as needed, and the agency has developed a contributor training class that is conducted in less than one hour.

The contributed content is saved in the server in its native format, such as a word processing document, spreadsheet or graphic file, enabling easy updates. Content ranges from frequently used forms and new job listings to staff meeting agendas and employee newsletters.

The Stellent Content Categorizer automatically categorizes submitted content by attaching metadata to each piece of information so it is easily retrieved on the intranet. Stellent customized the intranet's search function so agency employees have the option to conduct simple or complex searches. A "Quick Search" feature with a single text field enables users to search within major content categories for keywords in document titles or text. A more complex search is conducted through four search fields that include title, author, comments and full-text, and two drop down lists with a document type and agency section. An advanced search gives employees options for searching every metadata field, including release dates and document security groups, as well as specifying the layout of the search results.

Once submitted, the Stellent Content Management system automatically converts the content from its native format to a variety of Web formats, such as HTML, XML, PDF or WML, and automatically publishes the content to the agency's intranet, eliminating the need to route content through a Webmaster for coding prior to publishing.

Stellent Content Management's personalization feature enabled the agency to set up 18 different levels of security and attach business rules to each user profile. Employees have varying levels of access to information on the intranet, depending upon their security classification. This ensures employees access only information they are entitled to see.

The Stellent Content Management system also easily integrates with the agency's existing technology systems, including a SQL server and workstations with Microsoft Windows NT operating systems and Netscape 4.7 Internet browsers.

Benefits of Using Stellent Content Management
The Oregon Employment Department is reaping numerous benefits from its Stellent-powered intranet.

The Stellent Content Management system has enabled the agency to improve efficiencies related to managing organizational content by 75 percent. "Agency employees no longer search through binders for information on unemployment benefits and other policy-related information," Rickman said. "If an issue arises, employees simply type a keyword into the intranet's search field and immediately access the content they need to make a decision."

For example, the Stellent Content Management system enables the agency's employment hearing officers, who telecommute and are responsible for resolving Unemployment Insurance issues between employees and employers, to make hearing decisions quickly. In the past, officers faxed requests to the agency for information on how past cases had been resolved. Now, they simply log on to the intranet from home and access the content they need to make an informed decision.

Because content contribution is spread across the organization, Stellent Content Management also allows the agency's Webmaster to spend more time overseeing and improving the agency's entire Web infrastructure, rather than coding and managing content for the employee intranet.

"It used to take a month for us to get a large volume of information, such as an employee benefits manual, published to the intranet," Rickman said. "Those projects now take one day. This efficiency has allowed the Internet development staff to spend more time building and enhancing public agency Web sites that have a broader impact on employees and employers across the state."

Finally, Stellent Content Management enables the agency to eliminate expenses related to printing and distributing hard copies of employee manuals, employee policies and agency forms.

"Oregon taxpayers trust that the agency will run in an efficient and effective manner, so they receive a maximum return on investment from their tax dollars," said Rickman. "The Stellent Content Management system allows us to do that, and we're looking forward to future benefits the system will provide as we add new modules, such as customized home pages and saved queries."

Stellent Content Management Features
Stellent Content Management, formerly known as Xpedio Content Management, rapidly deploys scalable content-centric Web sites and manages business and Web content for other e-business applications, such as enterprise portals and business commerce applications. The system Web-enables business content by aggregating content from multiple sources, converting it to Web formats, managing and publishing it to the Web, and personalizing it for specific audiences, devices and applications. Stellent Content Management allows anyone, from one to thousands of users, to easily contribute content via a browser in any format and automatically convert it to a variety of Web formats, such as PDF, HTML, XML, WML and cHTML. The system also integrates with existing security systems and provides business personalization features. For information on how to obtain the Stellent Content Management system, contact Stellent at 1-800-989-8774.