Marc De Wilde discusses the development of the Extranet-based Document Delivery System. The EU Committee is very confident that the system will become an essential tool for distributing all kinds of information to its members. The push system (i.e. forwarding the documents to the users) will increasingly be replaced by a pull approach (i.e. people visiting the site and pulling off documents). People will indeed become familiar with the use of their browser to go and collect information.
The EU Committee represents 148 large multinational companies of American parentage, active investors in Europe, to the institutions of the European Union and the Council of Europe.
The first purpose of the EU Committee is to play an active role in the development of the single European market (involving the 15 member states) by developing positions and propositions at the drafting stage on policies or legislative initiatives of concern to business.
The EU Committee also co-ordinates EU affairs for the European Council of American Chambers of Commerce (ECACC) representing some 16.000 members over $350 billions of US investment in Europe. The Committee represents directly 3 millions European employees and indirectly 10 millions jobs.
The EU Committee is a Belgian, non-profit making organisation, with its own secretariat and annual budget. This structure is divided into 13 subcommittees (technical and specialised aspects of legislation) and 38 specialised working groups. Total participation in the subcommittees is over 650 individuals drawn from the member companies.
The organisation of the EU Committee (subcommittees, working groups and secretariat) generates a very large amount of documents (about 90.000 copies per month) that are dispatched to its members by normal mail or by fax broadcasting.
The need for an extranet-based document delivery system was obvious. The objective of introducing such as system was plural:
The project would change the patterns of communication. Key documents would be sent (`pushed'), but members would have the flexibility to choose (`pull') which other documents they wished to receive. These documents could be delivered by internet, e-mail or fax.
John Russell, European Affairs Manager, has led the EU Committee secretariat for 9 years. With the help of his team composed of 20 persons, he has built a well-organised organisation now viewed as an efficient interest group on the Brussels scene. The EU Committee also publishes a range of books and brochures covering policy issues such as the environment, information society and EU enlargement.
Despite a very busy schedule, John found enough time to provide all necessary information and to supervise the realisation of the extranet project.
Given that the good communication is seen as being central to the success of a public affairs organisation, John is indeed convinced that management must make time available to get involved in this type of project and not just leave it to IT professionals.
In September 1997, Seasoft was selected by the EU Committee to provide assistance in the development and set-up of a document delivery system adapted to its specific way of working. Thanks to its Intranet-based Document Library Solution, Seasoft was able to propose an advanced and cost-effective solution to address the EU Committee documents management requirements. |
The agreed approach was to start from Seasoft's existing Document Library solution and adapt it to fit the EU Committee's requirements.
A functional analysis was conducted with John Russell and some key collaborators between October and December 1997 to identify where customisation was necessary and to develop additional modules.
To ensure that success of the project, it was realised very quickly that the "buy in" of the secretariat was important. Key users such as documents publishers and administrators of the application were chosen very early in the process. This enabled them to be involved during the entire analysis stage and certainly helped produce a correct definition of the requirements. The resulting project became closely integrated to their existing working patterns. Moreover it also ensured commitment to the delivery solution by the entire staff.
Following the project definition, customisation work started in March 1998. A prototype version was installed in June 1998 in order to get feedback from the staff. Training was organised over two half-days. The final version was installed in August 1998. After an extensive test period of two months, the document delivery system was officially released at the end of October.
The document delivery system (DDS) according to EU Committee's requirements includes the following characteristics:
The intranet document delivery solution has been developed in Active Server Page (ASP) using Visual Interdev 1.0. It runs on two Compaq Proliant 1600 servers with 256 RAM and 3 hard disks of 9 Gbytes (in Raid 5). Both servers are running Windows NT 4.0 Server, Internet Information Server 4.0, Index Server 1.0 and SQL Server 6.5 as database engine.
In order to maximise performance for both secretariat staff publishing the documents on the system, and company members pulling off documents, it was decided to split the system. On the one side, an intranet server is located in the EU Committee's premises. On the other side, an extranet server is maintained externally (presently in Seasoft's premises).
An advanced replication mechanism based on MSMQ guarantees instantaneous synchronisation between the two servers through the Internet.
The initial budget for the project was approximately 3 millions BEF with development costs running at some 60 % of this figure, the remaining cost covering project hardware, standard software and related licenses.
It took about a full-time week for staff to define about 900 users and publish 300 documents.
Technical maintenance costs are very limited, being less than 100,000 BEF per year as the application can be entirely configured by the application administrator via parameter settings. This figure does not include the cost of the Internet connection (because this was needed anyway for the e-mail facility) and the cost of a housing contract with an ISP.
All objectives listed above have been met: improvement of communications with members, increase of secretariat productivity with regard to document distribution, reduction of paper and postal costs. It is now easier to get a consensus by building up a virtual meeting place where members can easily exchange their views and related documents.
Moreover, it is anticipated that the electronic document delivery system will have far reaching impact on the way the overall organisation operates, particularly on the frequency and the character of meetings. Indeed it already appears that the need to organise meetings to collect and exchange information will decrease while meeting contents will be more focussed on analyses of policy issues.
The document delivery system also raises new challenges and questions for the organisation: Will the members sustain the increased documents productivity of the secretariat? What is the optimal amount of documents (books, articles) which should be published on line? What will be the exact role of virtual meetings being (conducted through forums)?
The guarantee of success of such a project is based on three key elements:
The EU Committee is very confident that the extranet-based document delivery system will become an essential tool for distributing all kinds of information to its members. The push system (i.e. forwarding the documents to the users) will increasingly be replaced by a pull approach (i.e. people visiting the site and pulling off documents).
Given the variety of platforms and software through the member companies, it was originally decided to distribute documents in Acrobat PDF format. However, it is anticipated that documents will be distributed in a wider range of formats in the future and the document delivery system has inbuilt flexibility to accommodate this.
As members get accustomed to the new system, the more the system will be configured to define new groups and adapt to new ways of working including increasing interactivity between secretariat and members, and between members. Moreover, the project is seen by management as not static, but evolutionary.
If you have any comments on this article, please contact the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).
 Marc De Wilde (41), Business Development Coordinator, is Co-founder of Seasoft. He supervises all commercial and functional aspects of the developments. He is an energetic man determined to enjoy life to the maximum. |
For
citation purposes:
Marc De Wilde, "The EU
Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce in Belgium: Extranet-based
Document Delivery System," Exploit Interactive, issue 1, 10 April 1999
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue1/seasoft/>