A2Dominion Group has completed the automation of its annual Declaration of Interests processes using a SharePoint-based system from Parabola Software.
As part of its corporate governance, A2Dominion requires all employees, board members and other individuals related to the organisation to complete a Declaration of Interests form once a year as well as whenever their DoI information changes. However, with around 900 employees in almost 70 offices across London and Southern England, the housing provider’s governance team found that keeping track of these and other forms using a paper-based system was a significant administrative burden and wanted to move to an electronic system to record, track, approve and retain DoI forms without the need for manual scrutiny.
SharePoint 2010 was chosen as the automation platform as it was already in the pipeline as the replacement for A2Dominion’s Intranet, with Parabola Software chosen to build the automated DoI application based on A2Dominion’s previous relationship with them.
Richard Gray, managing director, Parabola Software, said, “As well as being a great collaboration platform, SharePoint is very extensible. When companies are using SharePoint as the platform for staff communication or HR processes, there is often a good business case for running a purpose-built application on the same platform.”
The content of the DoI form and approval status for each employee is now completely handled by the application which makes extensive use of SharePoint workflows and tasks. Every employee’s Active Directory account is used by SharePoint to authorise their use of the application, and email alerts are used to remind those who haven’t completed their DoI form. Most people complete their DoI form without any need for managers to chase them but if the alert is ignored for a certain amount of time, a further reminder will be sent and eventually the issue will be escalated to the individual’s manager or finally A2Dominion’s governance team.
A2Dominion reported that retrieving and reporting the DoI information is now much easier as all the completed forms are held in a central database. Security is also much better; compared with the paper-based system where a form left on somebody’s desk could be read by anybody, the new solution restricts access to each staff member and their manager.
Trevor Whittaker, head of business systems, A2Dominion Group, said, “The use of intelligent workflows has the potential to improve additional Group processes as demonstrated by our success with the Declaration of Interest management. Taking away the burden of paper management simplifies and improves the way we work.”
