NZ Transport Agency improves employee productivity and provides better public access to information with enterprise search.

The Business

The NZ Transport Agency creates transport solutions for a thriving New Zealand. They do this through planning of land transport networks, investing in land transport, managing the state highway network, and providing access to and use of the land transport network. The Transport Agency works closely with many partners and the general public; all of whom need good transport information for a wide range of purposes, with safety a key focus.

The Challenge

The Transport Agency places a high value on information, to keep the organisation running smoothly, interact with partners and deliver service to the public. When the Transport Agency was formed in 2008 through the merger of Land Transport New Zealand and Transit New Zealand, a large number of content sources were inherited, meaning information was fragmented and hard to find, 

As a result, workers at the Transport Agency were becoming frustrated, and a lack of trust in existing search tools had created a perception that information in their main content management system ‘just disappeared’.

Partners and the general public were also struggling to find important procedures and project information on various transport websites, resulting in the contact centre receiving calls for assistance from people looking for information.

The Transport Agency weren’t alone. Other government organisations from the transport sector were experiencing similar challenges, and so, working to a sector information management strategy, the transport sector decided to join forces and find a solution to meet their needs. 

The Solution

Through a government tender issued in 2012, The Transport Agency and the Ministry of Transport selected Syl Search from Syl Limited to provide an enterprise-wide search function to users at both agencies. Syl Search was integrated with a number of content sources, providing quick and easy access to a wide range of information. Syl Search is a semantic search tool, enabling users to search for the meaning or context of information, using the agencies’ own terminology and acronyms to achieve highly-relevant search results quickly and easily.

Head of Information at the Transport Agency, Tracy Parsons, explains that the sector agencies were looking for a strategic partnership from the outset,with a partner that would invest and be flexible throughout the contract term and beyond. Tracy was impressed with Syl’s in-depth knowledge of enterprise search and how easy it was to engage with the team. As Tracy says, “Syl just get enterprise search. It isn’t Internet search, it needs to be more precise”.

Syl Search was rolled out on-time and on-budget providing users with streamlined access to multiple content sources, and providing customers and partners with a much-improved search function on transport sector websites. The project is now known as OneSearch and is considered a huge success by Tracy, the steering group and the Transport Agency executive.