British Army regiments data

The headquarters of the British Army Land Command (HQ Land) has invested £1m in a new electronic document and record management system.

Valid Information Systems and CMG have been commissioned to build the service which will go live in September. It will run on HQ Land's existing Integrated Staff Information System infrastructure.

A total of 12 HQ Land branches and 400 users will gain access to the record management system.

Phil Lee, technical director at Valid, said that 1.4Tb of data has been added to the new system, most of which was transferred from an existing Filenet implementation.

The Valid system also includes full scanning and image processing capabilities for converting paper documents.

Lee explained that HQ Land chose Valid for its workflow integration, multiple office handling and web interface. Valid created a custom intranet interface to the data especially for the project.

"The main challenge here has been to make the web interface act like a traditional file manager," said Lee. "It needs to give the best record management and access control."

Integrator CMG is managing the project, which aims to establish a common file system that can eventually be used across all the British armed forces.

The consultancy has been working strategically on a number of projects with HQ Land over the past three years.

Simon Bailey, UK managing director for CMG Defence and Intelligence, maintained that the system will store deployment files ranging from exercise records to high level strategy documents.

"HQ Land is at the sharp end of the army," he said. "As such, it is interested in being as efficient in the back office as possible."

"CMG assisted the Army in selecting a suitable system that would support business processes and people, making life easier by minimising the time taken to pull information together," he added.

According to Bailey, support from HQ Land has been a major factor in the project's success.

"People and processes are essential to the success of this type of work. Commitment from the top which is more than lip service should not be overlooked," he explained.

Getting the integration right is as important as the products, according to Debra Logan, research director at Gartner.

"In UK military applications the quality of the implementation is as important as the underlying products themselves," she said.

Valid also developed a number of specialist tools for HQ Land, including document routing processes for individual branches, duplicate document recognition, and Army Registry SmartSave which integrates the software with office applications for document creation.