The Dental Council regulates oral health professionals to ensure safe, effective care for the public of New Zealand. Their work relies on accurate, accessible, and compliant information across all their operations. The Dental Council are a small team that manage sensitive information with prescriptive legal obligations under an Act of Parliament and in compliance with Health Privacy principles.
Following a recent “lift and shift” of files from a shared drive to a single SharePoint site, the Dental Council faced significant painpoints:
- Duplication and version confusion: Multiple copies of documents and difficulty locating the latest version.
- Poor access: Staff struggled to locate content due to inconsistent folder structures and storage practices.
- Policy and governance needs: Lack of a strong information and records management policy and guidance on ownership of content.
- Underutilised use of M365 capabilities: Limited use of metadata, taxonomy, and compliance features.
These issues increased compliance risk and caused inefficiencies in document management.
Sysdoc was approached by the Dental Council to consider how improvements could be made to information management to address these issues and make better use of the modern Microsoft 365 tools.
Our Approach
Sysdoc applied a phased, people-centred approach:
1
Discovery & Design
Captured the current state and pain points, mapped existing architecture and designed a future state information architecture, taxonomy and metadata model.
2
Detailed Design & Governance
Delivered a Design Standard covering architecture, taxonomy, metadata, governance model and business rules, and revised the information management policy.
3
Implementation & Migration
Built and tested a proof of concept SharePoint site, built out the collection of SharePoint sites to form the new Document Management System (DMS), developed a migration and action plan and migrated all available documents to the new DMS.
4
Enablement & Adoption
Developed eLearning modules to train staff on the new information management policy and ways of working, and supported staff communications and updated guidance.
The Outcome
The Dental Council now has a well-defined information management policy, modern document management system, and support and guidance for new ways of working for both end-users and administrators.
