Veterans Administration - OIG

Challenge:
Collaborating On Sensitive Data

As the investigative arm of the Veterans Administration, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) needs quick access to sensitive information. Offices and field agents are scattered around the country, and sharing data and documents is vital to OIG's efficiency and effectiveness.

Unfortunately, OIG's SharePoint server farm was shared by every section of VA, and security was out of OIG's hands. In addition, the farm was limited in server space and functionality, which made it difficult for OIG to do much meaningful work. They weren't able to leverage SharePoint to its best advantage.

Solution:
Server Migration, Governance Policy, Training

Edge helped OIG's IT staff migrate their site to a new SharePoint server farm of their own. We began with an evaluation of the existing set of sites. Then we helped OIG tailor a hardware solution to meet their current and future demands. After a successful migration to the test server, Edge coached OIG through the live site migration and helped them tweak the system.

Once we were all satisfied with the migration, Edge conducted a capabilities assessment of the new farm to demonstrate how SharePoint's full functionality could help OIG. Then we conducted interviews with the OIG directorates to discover how people could work better by using SharePoint. Together, we created a governance policy that covered everything: from how the farm should be maintained, down to when users can create subsites.

After the governance policy was accepted, Edge trained OIG end users to take advantage of SharePoint's features and feel comfortable working on the new site. In addition, we facilitated "train the trainer" sessions so OIG could bring new people up to speed in the future.

Result:
Operational Autonomy, Flexibility, Security

Using the operational guidance of the governance policy, OIG is able to respond quickly to feature requests and perform troubleshooting. Since their IT staff manages the server farm, OIG can create or rearrange sites as user needs dictate. Most importantly, OIG can present internal and public information securely.

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