PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP Canada
Microsoft Sharepoint™ Technology Helps PWC Canada Overcome Information Overload
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Company Overview
Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Canada, (PwC) is a provider of industry-focused assurance, advisory and tax services for public, private and government clients in all markets. The firm and its related entities have more than 4,200 partners and staff, and offices in 24 locations throughout Canada. In 2005, Maclean’s magazine named PwC one of Canada’s best employers. PwC is a member firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited, with more than 122,000 partners and staff in 144 countries.
Technology plays a key role in the day-to-day work of PwC people. As trusted advisors to Canada’s leading businesses, they require access to a wide variety of internal and external information, tools and applications, as well as a wide range of detailed client data. The huge volume of diverse information PwC employees work with presented efficiency and productivity challenges.
Business Challenge
Maneuvering through a number of disconnected point solutions delivering specific types of information was confusing and time consuming for PwC employees. Staff would often have to search through numerous large databases before finding the information they were looking for. Information for one client could reside within multiple data repositories, for example, requiring staff to search through all of them to get a complete client overview.
“The approach taken by traditional systems, requiring the individual user to be the point of integration, was no longer acceptable in a world of increasing data repositories, tools and applications,” says Marc Milgrom, e-business leader, PwC. “The burden on our people was too great and an inhibitor to greater efficiency.”
“We have over four thousand employees in Canada, but more than eight thousand databases and other repositories,” says Steven Lugarini, IT director (Canadian business solutions), PwC. “The message we were receiving from staff was that we had the tools they needed to deliver value to clients, but the sheer volume was overwhelming and impacting productivity. Having to deal with technology was taking too much time away from client work. We had a bad case of information overload.”
The firm wanted to simplify and integrate its heterogeneous IT infrastructure, while continuing to be integrated with the other member firms of PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited. It is a highly collaborative organization, with member firms drawing information and expertise from each other. This meant that whatever solution was put in place in Canada would have to allow for integration with systems in international member firms.
“Because of the nature of the work we do, we are a firm that puts a big focus on ROI,” says Lugarini. “Due to the national and international nature of our clients and our organization, together with our collaborative approach to delivering value to clients, making sure that whatever solution we put in place would work with other systems was a huge priority.”
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Solution
Back in 2002, PwC decided to address its information overload and knowledge management challenges and provide infrastructure integration through a country- wide portal solution. In order to make sure the portal would serve the needs of its people, the portal team went through an extensive consultation process with focus groups of staff and partners across Canada—listening to their in-depth business needs and gathering information on business-user requirements.
“What we heard during those consultations is that staff members do not want to work with specific applications, rather they are looking for particular types of information about a client and would prefer to access that information in a simple and holistic way,” says Lugarini. “We decided to create that solution through executive dashboards, or portal pages which pull information about a particular client or issue automatically from various sources and deliver it to the user through a single location.”
“Our portal now provides the foundation for continued future development of our integrated online environment, including the implementation of Web services technology, facilitating application integration and further connectivity among PwC professionals, as well as creating more extensive connectivity with our clients,” says Milgrom. “The technology becomes the point of integration, not the user.”
The firm is also able to increase productivity and efficiency through its organization, by transferring the time staff previously spent searching for information to client work and other strategic business tasks to better serve its clients. Much more than just a content repository, it is changing the way their people work.
Building an Effective Business Portal
PwC worked with its internal development team on the creation of a portal. After careful consideration, they decided to implement Microsoft® SharePoint™ Portal Server 2003, since it allowed them to easily develop an intelligent portal to seamlessly connect users and information. With Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 2003, the firm was able to integrate information from various disparate systems and applications into a single portal dashboard, providing easy and efficient access to information for users.
Microsoft’s SharePoint Portal solution made it easier for the team to deliver the information each user needed through customization and personalization features. These features allow the developer to target information, programs and updates to audiences based on their organizational role, team membership, interest, security group, or any other membership criteria that can be defined.
Delivering Solutions Quicker and Seamlessly with .NET
Relevant content, such as line-of-business and Office programs, Web services, news, client relationship and other firm data is delivered to the portal through Web parts. The PwC development team created appropriate Web parts working with Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET. Using XML Services, data is pulled from several heterogeneous systems, and brought all together in these Web parts to manage a client account in one place.
“When we realized that Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 2003 is based on ASP.NET, the choice to introduce the solution became really easy,” says Raj Ganju, senior development manager, PwC. “Web parts are standard ASP.NET custom controls, and Microsoft provides templates that further simplify the process of creating Web parts. We work with ASP.NET on a daily basis, so we would be able to proceed with this development without having to train our developers on any new technologies.”
Working with ASP.NET in Visual Studio .NET, the PwC development team was able to build Web-based applications quickly and easily. As a result of the simplified programming model that ASP.NET provides, building Web applications required by the portal took significantly less time than with classic ASP.
By taking advantage of a full XML Web services architecture for the project, PwC was able to ensure the portal would be an effective integration point for all of the organization’s applications. Because XML Web services allow applications to communicate and share data over the Internet, regardless of operating system or language, the organization was able to ensure that the portal would both integrate internally used applications, and work with applications used by member firms globally.
Business Benefits
By using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 along with Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework, PwC has been able to provide its people with a quick and easy way to access comprehensive client and market performance information. Partners and staff now receive up-to-date information without being overwhelmed by the volume of data and applications they need to manage on a daily basis.
Less Applications, More Information
XML Web services support within Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 has enabled the PwC IT team to develop dedicated portal pages, or executive dashboards that provide partners and staff with a complete overview of information pertaining to a client, market issue or business challenge. Staff still has access to all of the information residing in PwC’s databases, but instead of having to search through several different applications for the data, now they can access it from a single location in a contextual manner.
“We have gone from an environment where our staff was spending too much time searching for information, to one where all required information is available to them instantly,” says Lugarini. “By using XML, data can be integrated directly into the portal and can be uniformly presented to the user through the executive dashboard, regardless of what application the information comes from.”
The unified, simple way of presenting users with business information is also helping to solve PwC’s information overload and knowledge management challenges. Because the Microsoft portal is a point of business integration between all enterprise applications the firm works with, the user only has one source of information they need to deal with. A single, consistent user interface also makes it easier for users to access information, again providing a great tool for dealing with information overload.
Change is Business as Usual
As advisors to Canadian business, PwC needs to be able to respond quickly and efficiently to any market changes or issues. The technology within the rich framework that ASP.NET provides helps the organization do that, by significantly reducing the time it takes developers to introduce new functionality to the portal.
“Using tools like Visual Studio.NET allows us to maintain a very active development cycle with this project; we are adding new Web parts every month. This ability has helped make the portal a tremendous success with our business users because we are able to immediately respond to a new need, and offer a solution to a new challenge,” says Ganju. “Recently, we developed a new enterprise-wide business application that we were able to take from concept to pilot in six months. This approach significantly reduced our development effort, not to mention the technology purchase and staff training costs that we never had to worry about.”
“We are being singled out internationally as an example of a successful portal strategy because this project was not about application A or application B. It was about a solid strategy, an open architecture and solving business needs to help our people better serve our clients,” says Lugarini.
Extending the Team
The PwC team is already looking at ways to expand the use of Microsoft’s SharePoint Portal technologies within its environment. The firm has been looking for a way to make its client work a more collaborative process, and is now looking to implement Microsoft Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services (WSS), a feature that is offered with Windows Server™ 2003.
The PwC team is already looking at ways to expand the use of Microsoft’s SharePoint Portal technologies within its environment. The firm has been looking for a way to make its client work a more collaborative process, and is now looking to implement Microsoft Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services (WSS), a feature that is offered with Windows Server™ 2003.
“At this point, we typically work on a document, submit it to the client for review, then they send it back with their changes,” says Lugarini. “With Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services we will not only be able to move away from relying on e-mail as a primary mode of sharing the document, but we’ll be able to carry out discussions through the virtual team space, something that was more difficult to do before.”
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For more information about PricewaterhouseCoopers products and services, call (416) 863 1133 or visit the Web site at: www.pwc.com/ca
