EWON streamlines content management and compliance with iWorkplace for Microsoft 365

The Energy & Water Ombudsman NSW (EWON) is the government-approved dispute resolution scheme for New South Wales electricity, gas, and some water customers. As an industry-based Ombudsman scheme, EWON independently investigates and resolves complaints about its members, working towards a fair and reasonable outcome for all parties.

The content chaos challenge

EWON’s mission is to provide high-quality, independent dispute resolution and raise customer service standards in the energy and water industries. However, this mission becomes challenging to achieve consistently when content is stored across different systems, such as OneDrive, Teams, file servers, or business applications. This disparate approach to content storage resulted in work output inconsistency and increased data integrity risk. While Microsoft Teams had been rolled out at speed initially to support urgent work from home demands, planning and a streamlined structure for content management had not been an initial priority.

Speaking to David Kneeshaw, General Manager for Finance and Corporate Services at EWON, “From an individual perspective, our key pain point was that we had files all over the place including file servers, Microsoft 365, and CRM. Because everything was everywhere, we had different ways of doing things across EWON. Each team had a different way of approaching cases, using different storage, approval, etc. Our staff also had to access some of their documents via VPN, which slowed our people down.”.  

Kneeshaw also shared their objective of fortifying information security at EWON.

“From an organisational perspective, we wanted tighter security in our document storage, especially with our permissions. We wanted our new content management platform to ensure the governance of our documents to cover organisational and compliance risks”, continued Kneeshaw. “We were looking for a much more consolidated way of storing our content, streamlining our processes, and taking advantage of the collaboration and integration between Microsoft Teams and our document storage.”

Making content management and compliance effortless with iWorkplace

To better empower their people to achieve their work consistently, EWON needed to provide the organisation with improved content management access and practices. A Professional Advantage (PA) client since 2019, EWON commissioned its trusted Microsoft consulting partner to help them modernise their content management platform with iWorkplace for Microsoft 365.

iWorkplace is a set of frameworks and tools that run within Microsoft 365, designed to help organisations achieve their data protection and compliance requirements at scale and, most importantly, in an easier, more cost-effective, and user-friendly way. It unifies information management, compliance, and collaboration, with one place to file things making it easy for their people to ‘do the right thing’.

“One of the key appeals of iWorkplace is it sits within the Microsoft 365 environment, so you get all the benefits of the integrated apps and services,” shared Kneeshaw.

“We’ve been using Microsoft Teams and SharePoint since the pandemic, so there is already familiarity with these apps, which was a big tick for us.”

The iWorkplace apps and frameworks allow organisations to automate information management and compliance elements easily, which would typically be challenging to achieve with Microsoft 365 out of the box. The following are examples of some of the iWorkplace frameworks and tools implemented for EWON:

1. Smart Metadata – allows metadata to be automatically applied to content based on the location (folder or subfolder) a file is stored.
2. Smart Case Files – allows for consistent management of case files, including those with complex permissions and stages.
3. Smart Provisioning – allows for automated site and Team builds, including self-service, enabling workspaces to be created and updated based on settings in a SharePoint list completed by business users.

EWON has shared some of the big wins they realised after implementing iWorkplace: 

Enhanced content security and compliance.

iWorkplace made it easier for EWON to stay compliant by automatically applying metadata and retention and disposal policies to their content, rather than having their employees manually apply them.

“There is a lot of automation in iWorkplace which we like as it removes workload from our users. Things like tagging documents and the retention and disposal process now just happen in the background.”

“There was also the automatic setup of registers and projects, which enabled us to do it properly and consistently.”

“By configuring and leveraging iWorkplace across the organisation, EWON has achieved a best-in-class modern digital workplace as part of their business-as-usual operations,” said Lea Brooks, Principal Consultant at Information Leadership (iWorkplace principal partner).

“iWorkplace gave our management team and the Board peace of mind knowing that our content is well governed and compliant.” shared Kneeshaw.

Empowered teams to work better together.

iWorkplace’s unified content management, collaboration, and compliance solution made it easier for their people to collaborate across teams.

“iWorkplace helped centralise our content that was once scattered across the organisation,” said Kneeshaw.

“We used to have several registers for contracts, policies and procedures, etc, but now they’re all in one place and we can access them through SharePoint or Teams.”

“iWorkplace also helped with our internal review and approval processes, especially when people are working across different teams. It is now much easier to collaborate and share documents compared to previously needing to email back and forth. It really helps when we all use the same system: wherever you work, you can talk the same language with other people," said Kneeshaw.

“iWorkplace helped the different teams at EWON work more closely together.”

Realising time and money savings.

“We have saved a lot of time in the review process because collaboration can happen in real time thanks to the automated processes introduced by iWorkplace,” shared Kneeshaw.

“We are also making significant savings by moving everything into SharePoint as we are not having to manage and keep servers up to date. We’re just using the free allocation in SharePoint, so it’s costing us nothing anymore. In contrast, it previously cost us a lot to store the data and maintain that service.”

Looking ahead

While EWON is pleased with the project's positive outcomes, its content management and compliance journey does not end there.

“Everyone at EWON uses iWorkplace now, and it’s become a core part of what we do,” said Kneeshaw. “But there’s a lot of things that we are still working through regarding the best ways to get the most out of the system, such as the naming conventions of documents and folders.”

“We also have other features that we will look at exploring as well, like iWorkplace’s Guest Management to enable us to have tighter control over who has external access to our content,” said Kneeshaw.

iWorkplace content lifecycle with automated retention and disposal policies is also on the roadmap for early 2025, building on the iWorkplace foundation already laid.

Reflecting on the iWorkplace implementation experience

Looking back on the overall experience working with Professional Advantage in transforming their content management and compliance practices, Kneeshaw shared, “We are not experts in this space, so we intentionally partnered with a subject matter expert like Professional Advantage to get the expertise to guide us through the process. At the beginning it is almost overwhelming, and it took us a little while to get our head into it and to see what the different options were and how we might want to set it up for EWON.”.

“It was really great having PA and Information Leadership to guide us through this project. Overall, we did have our hand held all the way and ended up with a very good outcome,” said Kneeshaw.   

Andrew MacKenzie, Practice Lead for Modern Work and Security at Professional Advantage, said, “When a client decides to invest in something new, it's really important to have the full confidence that the platform they take on will make a difference to their work and their people. From day one, we knew this project would transform enterprise content management at EWON and would do so without adding significant administration overhead, and that's a special feeling.”.

Adrian Goddard, Senior Modern Work Consultant at Professional Advantage, added, “The EWON project team's journey through deploying a comprehensive and new solution has been truly inspiring. It has been extremely rewarding to watch them quickly grasp iWorkplace and take ownership of the new platform. The outcome is an environment that EWON fully understands and can confidently self-manage, instilling trust and assurance right across their organisation.”.  

Brooks seconded Goddard’s feedback. “It was great to see how the EWON project team engaged in the implementation process and took ownership of the adoption program, ensuring their people grasped the benefits and power of the iWorkplace apps.”