Information Management and Decision making support system for distributed organization

Implementation goals

As the business grows, the companies face the necessity to make more and more efforts to retain the same level of management responsiveness and development dynamics. Implementation of the information management solution mentioned above helps to solve this problem by creating a single management and information space in a multilevel distributed company and by implementing specific rules for processing information and documents.

The main goal of the solution implementation is ensuring a walk-through corporate-wide process of processing information and documents and uniting a complex geographically distributed structure into a single information space. The solution covers all business areas and brings notable benefits to all tiers of the value chain of creation of telecommunication services and provision of them to a consumer.

The most important result of the system implementation is a revolutionary increase in decision-making speed in a geographically distributed environment by means of:

• Rapid information exchange, opinion coordination and document review and approval, which finally results in swift and weighted decision-making process based on a broad range of opinions and various aspects
• A significant competitive advantage provided to the customer in on-demand market environment. On the one hand, the system allows significant reduction of the corporate costs, including the time spent by top executives. On the other hand, it allows to enhance the customer service quality and to increase the corporate response to new market opportunities and to boost the productivity of every corporate officer.
• All above helps to increase the market share, to enter new markets and to increase the overall business efficiency.

The Functionality

The system functionality covers all key processes of the company in the field of document support of the management. including:

• incoming/outgoing document processing;
• working with internal corporate documents (such as orders, instructions, etc.), memoranda and tasks, providing means for document coordination and signing, and control over executive discipline;
• maintenance of unified corporate directories (such as organizational structure of the company, information on employees, etc.), and many others.

The system runs in distributed mode which ensures prompt coordination of documents and swift decision-making despite significant distances between the offices. The system provides an engine for document archiving in a distributed network: when a document is being archived in one office, copies of such documents are automatically archived in all offices where such copies exist (say, in Moscow, in Samara or Vladivostok). In order to optimize and simplify the system administration working with a large number of distributed servers, a number of custom services for administrators is embedded into the system.

The system supports both informal and pre-defined document processing modes:

1) Informal document processing. This implies processing of miscellaneous office internal documents and memos that formalize different activities. Such documents may enforce coordination of a certain issue, notify employees of certain information, or an officer may use it to inform their colleagues or manager of their initiative, etc. It may be a reason to take some actions (such as marketing activities) or works (such as introducing a new service). The system supports creation of memo/report type documents, its successive review and approval, signing by an authorized person and fulfillment order.
2) Predefined document processing chain. In this case, the document, such as equipment purchase order, is assigned a typical customizable route which identifies the officers in charge of its approval, and the rules that determine the review and approval sequence of such document. Distributed document processing between the divisions is supported using a custom-built engine.

In addition to the above, deep integration with other corporate information systems is provided by the solution.
Works are currently under way to implement digital signatures support in documents (embedding and verifying) and to enhance significantly the workflow engine.
The shared information environment created in MTS unifies over 12,000 employees in over 90 cities across Russia and other countries.

Now the typical decision-making process takes 2 to 7 days on average, while it took some 2 to 3 weeks before. The control over tasks fulfillment was carried out mainly via a cell phone earlier, and it took half of a day or even more to check the status of all the open issues. Now all task fulfillment reports are collected in the single place. An executive spends hardly an hour to view and update them all.

The system has opened a new phase in creativity of the corporate employees. Every employee who has put forward a business enhancement initiative can see whom the document describing it was assigned to, who is reviewing the document, who has responded to that document and what was the response, etc.
The tecnology

The solution is based on BOSS-Referent Document Management System - a popular packaged product widely used by large and medium businesses in Russia and Ukraine. It is developed and owned by I. T. Co Group and is based on IBM Lotus Notes/Domino technologies:

• Domino Enterprise Server R6
• Notes Client R6