Project Background
The Ontario Energy Board (OEB) regulates a large, complex and dynamic electricity and natural gas industry in Ontario. It relies heavily on information and information technology to manage its processes, make regulatory decisions, stay on top of the energy market in Ontario, and disseminate information about that market to all its stakeholders - the Ministry of Energy, market participants, consumers and interested parties such as special interest groups.
In 2005, OEB had determined it could configure any business application based on five building blocks namely, Case Management, Workflow, Contact Management, Document Management and Web Publishing. A search for a single Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) application to fulfill the above requirements was not successful. A solutions integrator did have the Pivotal CRM from CDC Software integrated with Trim Document management software from Tower Software that met the requirements and implemented this solution in 2006.
Over time software owners changed hands and we now have Pivotal CRM (Avolin) 6.5.3 integrated with Content Manager v9 (Microfocus) to satisfy various business requirements. The following business applications have been configured to date:
- Case Management
- Records Management
- Consumer Complaints and Industry Enquiry Management
- Intranet Content Management
- Records and Reporting Requirements (RRR) and Scorecard
- Online Services (Regulated Entities Portal)
- Webdrawer (External Document Search)
- Reporting
- Contact Management
- Knowledge Management
- Consumer Engagement System
- eMarketing
There have been regular updates to the Pivotal CRM and the Content Manager applications to ensure the OEB has the most up to date technology in use. However, over time, this has led to the following challenges:
- Customized tools / integration, requires long lead times for upgrades and changes
- Application owners have changed hands multiple times - At the time of acquisition in 2006, CDC owned the Pivotal application, later acquired by Aptean, later acquired by Avolin. Tower Software, first owned the Trim document management application, later acquired by HPe (application name changed from Trim to Content Manager). HPe then merged with Micro Focus.
- No local presence / Difficult to find resources
- These tools have not been formally assessed in recent years
- Lack of Enterprise Architecture documentation
- Emerging alternatives (i.e., Cloud)
- Emerging functionality not available in the current Pivotal and Content Manager applications
Objectives
To address the above challenges by having an experienced consulting company (that will not be able to bid on the recommended implementation) perform a review of the Pivotal and Content Manager applications (status quo), meet with the project stakeholders (IT & Business) to find out current and future requirements. To document gaps between the current and future requirements which, will represent the “what” must be resolved, look for alternatives (the “how”) to close the gap to meet current and future requirements, perform an analysis and present findings / roadmap for implementation of future state either with new or existing system.
Please see the RFP document for full details, which is available only through MERX at www.merx.com or 1-800-964-6379, MERX reference number 00000158809.
