Ofgem, the office of gas and electricity markets, has selected Parity to build a document management system and externally facing website. The first stage of this project is the launch of a new website that will play a key role in helping market participants and consumers find information about gas and electricity regulation, changes and news that could affect them. The new Ofgem website will enable better and quicker access to gas and electricity market information for consumers and businesses. The second phase of the project will be to include a comprehensive internal employee intranet. This will significantly improve electronic document management and records management helping Ofgem to make progress towards achieving cost savings and improving efficiency through being able to more quickly find information and collaborate more effectively. Nick Simpson, Director of Enterprise Content Management at Ofgem explained, “Our first priority is helping to bring choice and value to consumers by improving transparency and clarity in the regulatory environment. As a national watchdog we have a duty to provide stakeholders with the most comprehensive information on gas and electricity markets available and to promote competition in the UK market. We can now publish this content far more efficiently and quickly and everyone can find the information and navigate around the new website far more intuitively.” People accessing the new Ofgem website can search for and retrieve information from approximately 16,000 documents that are constantly updated. Ofgem staff can now publish new content far more efficiently using this new platform which will save them time and reduce costs. Simpson continued, “The new internal intranet will also help our staff to work together more effectively by making it easier to retrieve and share information. Currently there are 1.2 million documents saved in our internal files, our current system makes it very difficult to search for and access these files. In some instances employees have turned to the web site to find a document because they could not locate it on the internal network.” David Conkleton, Managing Director of Parity Business Solutions, says, “This is a good example of how the public sector can work with commercial companies to meet efficiency goals by implementing leading edge technologies. We were also able to deliver training to their staff to get users up to speed from day one, through our training division at Parity.” The content and document management process of the website is underpinned by the use of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 which comprehensively manages how people find and share information across boundaries. The deployment of SharePoint Server 2007 is unique in that Ofgem is one of the first UK Public Sector organisations to implement the software.

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