Black Country Housing Group SharePoint Intranet and Document Management
Black Country Housing Group needed to bring order to a fragmented document estate and give staff secure, simple access to the information they needed. Blacklight delivered a modern SharePoint intranet that replaced legacy systems, cut running costs and kept the whole organisation connected through lockdown and beyond.
Migration to the SharePoint infrastructure was instrumental in enabling BCHG to deliver its corporate objective of facilitating colleagues working in an agile and flexible manner, assisting their access to documentation from any location on any device. Utilising SharePoint has enabled BCHG to derive many benefits from workflow processes, significantly reducing the amount of paper traffic within the Organisation whilst ensuring access to data is both secure and controlled.
The challenge
Black Country Housing Group has been providing social housing and residential care in the Birmingham and Black Country area since 1974. With 2,100 homes and two care homes, the organisation had grown steadily over five decades and the volume of data had grown with it.
Finding information for day-to-day tasks was becoming harder. Documents were spread across multiple systems, each with its own credentials and permissions. At the same time, the organisation operates in a regulated industry where controlling access to sensitive personal data is not optional. Balancing that requirement against giving staff timely access to the right information was a real challenge.
On top of that, communicating news across a large, dispersed organisation by printed newsletters and email was either slow and expensive or just added to the inbox overload staff were already dealing with.
What we built
Working with BCHG, Blacklight identified that a SharePoint intranet could solve both problems at once: giving staff a single, easy-to-use place to find the documents and news they needed, while ensuring sensitive information remained accessible only to the right people.
Rather than building something bespoke, we used SharePoint's latest out-of-the-box features to deliver a solution quickly and cost-effectively. The result was a modern, mobile-friendly intranet that reflected BCHG's corporate branding and put the most important information front and centre. Because it was built on standard SharePoint features, BCHG could make routine changes and adaptations themselves going forward, without raising change requests with a supplier.
When the intranet went live, BCHG was able to retire the legacy housing document management system along with the associated hardware, software and file servers. The move to the cloud also reduced support and administration costs across the board, from out-of-hours cover to VPN licensing.
For staff, the change was straightforward: one place to look, one set of credentials, everything they needed to do their job available from any device.
What this delivered
- 01 Legacy document management system and file servers fully retired
- 02 Single sign-on access to all documents and news, replacing multiple systems
- 03 Mobile-friendly intranet accessible from any device, anywhere
- 04 Reduced support and administration costs through cloud migration
- 05 Staff productivity maintained through COVID-19 lockdowns without disruption
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