Digitally Transforming the Future of Heritage Preservation
Helping a national cultural heritage and archival institution shift towards the digital preservation of Canadian artifacts.
Background: Preparing a National Institution for Digital Preservation at Scale
Cultural heritage institutions, museums, and archives today face increasing challenges related to accessibility, digitization, and security. As technology evolves, ensuring the public can easily access preserved materials and public records has never been more important — but many institutions require technical support and guidance to undertake this level of digital transformation.
Outwitly was engaged by a national cultural heritage and archival institution to support a shift toward new digital tools and processes for acquiring and preserving Canadian heritage artifacts. To move forward, the organization needed to clearly understand its existing service workflows, reveal pain points and inefficiencies, and align stakeholders across departments around shared digital best practices and a more connected future-state approach.
It was a real pleasure to work with Outwitly. They created an excellent report and there will be many positives to follow from this.
Senior Project Officer, Federal Government Office
Challenge: Fragmented Workflows and Silos Limiting Progress
As the organization worked to modernize digital acquisition and preservation, underlying structural and organizational constraints became increasingly visible. The volume of artifacts, the complexity of cross-departmental work, and the lack of shared systems made it difficult to move from intention to action.
Key challenges included:
Disconnected and inefficient processes. Manual, repetitive steps and unclear handoffs across departments slowed the acquisition and preservation of digital artifacts and contributed to a growing multi-year backlog.
Departmental silos and miscommunication. Limited cross-functional awareness made it difficult for teams to see how their work connected, weakening collaboration and creating friction between departments.
Barriers to advancing digital innovation. Without a shared, end-to-end understanding of how work flowed today, it was difficult to confidently introduce new tools or evolve toward more effective digital preservation practices.
Approach: Using Human-Centred Research to Align People, Process, and Technology
Outwitly’s design research and service design experts used a human-centred approach to help the organization see, share, and align around how acquisition and preservation work actually happened — and how it could work better in the future.
The work focused on:
Capturing and mapping workflows across departments. Through in-depth interviews (in person and remotely) and contextual observation at each step of acquisition and preservation, we captured the full reality of the work. Insights were synthesized into current-state journey maps that surfaced pain points, gaps, and inefficiencies, including disconnected manual and repetitive processes.
Facilitating collaborative validation of research findings. Outwitly facilitated a series of co-design workshops with staff and stakeholders to validate and refine the journey maps, ensuring findings accurately reflected day-to-day work while building shared understanding across teams.
Shaping a shared vision for improved processes. In a final cross-departmental co-design workshop, participants collaboratively envisioned and built an ideal future-state journey. The future-state map realized a connected workflow between all involved parties and addressed the major challenges felt in the work today.
Addressing the human side of digital transformation. Research and workshops created a neutral, safe space for staff to share concerns about job security, transparency, and change. Surfacing these interpersonal challenges helped build trust, reduce tension between more innovative and traditional teams, and generate momentum for transformation alongside technical improvements.
Findings and recommendations were documented in a final insights report that combined employee experience insights, key performance indicators, tactical recommendations, and concrete next steps leadership could immediately implement.
Results: Establishing the Foundation for Sustainable Digital Preservation
Throughout the engagement, Outwitly provided strategic guidance to help break down silos and support more effective communication between teams. The work gave leadership clearer visibility into employee needs, organizational dynamics, and the service changes required to support both cultural and process evolution.
Outcomes from the broader initiative will support the organization in several key ways:
Increasing digital acquisition and preservation capacity. By identifying inefficiencies, manual work, and structural gaps within existing workflows, the organization had a clearer path to increasing the number of digital items acquired and preserved each year without adding operational strain.
Surfacing opportunities for a streamlined, connected workflow. The current- and future-state journey maps provide a shared, end-to-end view of artifact acquisition, preservation, key challenges, and what they would look like in a resolved state — enabling teams to move away from fragmented departmental practices and toward a more coordinated approach.
Reducing processing time per digital item. Clearer understanding of handoffs, dependencies, and process gaps created the conditions for reducing processing time/touch time per digital item, and improving operational efficiency as changes are implemented.
Supporting readiness for change and cross-departmental collaboration. By creating a safe, neutral space for teams to voice concerns, feel heard, and participate in shaping future ways of working, the engagement also helped reduce uncertainty around change, while encouraging more open, constructive collaboration across departments.
This groundwork provided clearer direction and fostered shared understanding across the organization, helping the stakeholders and employees of this heritage institution move together toward creating more modernized, accessible, secure and efficient acquisition and preservation processes.
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