Ontario Electrical Contractor 25 BEFORE: 68 Random Folders 2017 Price Increase 2018 Chaus price increases Customer account Customer Surveys Distribution List of prospects Marketing Miscellaneous OQ Draft Nu Air – engineering files Orders on Hold Organizational Chart P8 Drafts Price Calculations Quotes – Proposals Research Sales Forecast Sales presentations Sales Weekly Level 10 Mtg Sales – Acct Support Weekly L10 SCR – Sales Call Report Standards Tension Testing Timing Etc. AFTER: 5 Intuitive Folders Department Meetings Events Leads Quotations Research Regardless of simplicity or complexity, what a lot of business leaders don’t know is where to start and how to navigate the transformation of any of these solutions. CASE STUDY: Using taxonomy to solve findability, document control and privacy One of iCinfo’s E&C clients has 30 employees in offices located in Canada and Asia. It has functions for design/ development, production, sales and administration and has been in business over 20 years with customers worldwide. As a “general contractor” leading E&C firms through their tech projects, iCinfo was brought in to help them transform their unstructured information such as that found on SharePoint sites, shared drives, hard drives and emails. Part of iCinfo’s holistic, straightforward approach is to start with a gap analysis. We learned: •  There were hundreds of parts to track; •  Multiple versions of customer records like quotes and orders; •  Information across incompatible systems: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, Excel spreadsheets, email, servers; •  IT services have a lot of work maintaining the network and managing storage space; •  Everyone’s using their own system, with different ways to describe and name things (Like the episode of Star Trek where the away team is trying to make sense of Klingon controls. We’re not talking the same language.); and •  The ERP system was going to be upgraded in the coming year! It is stressful (and risky) to be looking for the right customer quote while a project manager is away on vacation and the customer is waiting on the phone. We often heard words like “hell” and “nightmare” to describe this scenario that plays out in development shops all over Canada. After conducting a thorough gap analysis, a plan was drafted to deliver a taxonomy solution in the form of training. Through a series of workshops, staff quickly sketched a picture of a typical organization poised for innovation and growth but struggling to reach its potential as a leaner operation. We collaborated with users to establish a set of guidelines, and roles responsible for sustaining the new practices to ensure the culture was ready. We partnered with IT service providers to make sure the internal workflows and taxonomies were in place. The taxonomy project followed the typical arc from initial doubt by staff to engagement and then excitement. Sales Document Storage on Shared Drive Important success factors •  Commitment from the top; •  Defined clear goals; •  Working group of managers representing all business areas; •  Understanding current workflows, including defining the “community” of users, the identifiers they use, the systems and names they use, pain points;