In today’s rapidly evolving business and technology landscape, the power of efficient information management cannot be overstated. A global oil and gas operator stands as a prime example of how strategic focus on enhancing information management capabilities can lead to fast-moving and remarkable success. Information is an enterprise resource and a vital asset to the company. Therefore, efficient, safe, and compliant business operations must rely on effective information management.

Challenge

Before the company embarked on its transformative journey, they faced a common challenge across the organization: a flood of data scattered across various systems, information being kept in personal spaces and employees not knowing where to store their information. This not only hindered timely decision-making, but also led to inefficiencies, missed opportunities, decentralized storage and a strained workflow.

The Journey & Outcomes

Recognizing the need for change, Infotechtion laced the project scope involving an enterprise information management strategy and a Microsoft 365 blueprint for managing documents and records.

The project journey started off by identifying personas, user stories, and acceptance criteria. Based on these, Infotechtion delivered workshops to agree upon the new information management vision, goals, roles and responsibilities. In addition, developing a corporate framework for metadata, access, and retention for the companywill improve document and records management with in-place Record and Sensitivity labels.

To further incorporate the new ways of working, a governing document describing roles, responsibilities and requirements had to be put in place. When the requirements from the governing document were implemented, including the new corporate framework, the retro-fit phase could begin. This encompasses that all documents within the space of Microsoft 365 would get a new automated corporate metadata model, sensitivity labels and access permissions set in place, making document management more efficient and structured. In addition, the company utilized the advancements of Microsoft, by using Syntex – SharePoint Advanced Management to secure documents in libraries.

The global oil and gas operator was eager and forward thinking, not only making the process of implementation an efficient task, but also in the company wide adoption journey. Infotechtion provided adoption resources to ease the changes for the employees, focusing on short learning-modules and transparent communication.

Key Steps:

Centralized document repository

By standardizing a centralized document repository that served as the single truth for the whole company, they eliminated duplicates of the same documents, promoted information sharing and improved findability.

Automated workflow

Through metadata and security automation, routine tasks were streamlined, allowing employees to focus on higher-value activities. This led to increased productivity and reduced human errors.

Information protection

Our solution incorporated a security classification framework, safeguarding sensitive information.

Key Learnings

Microsoft Information Management enabled the oil and gas operator to standardize utilization of Microsoft 365 for collaboration and information management. The key is to incorporate automation where appropriate. Document repositories such as Microsoft Teams and SharePoint sites included automatic governance with default metadata and sensitivity labels. This improves search, findability and transparency of the whole company, not to mention it eliminates the burden for the employees.

Summary

In summary, a remarkable achievement unfolded as we successfully migrated a total of 5 million documents from on-premises storage facilities to cutting-edge cloud-based repositories. This significant effort included diligently securing, enhancing and enriching every single document while ensuring legal consistency. All documents reside now in some 1300 document libraries distributed across a network of about 900 SharePoint Online sites.