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Optimizing Information Management: Implementing OpenText Documentum XCP for Efficient Records Management

Problem background

A city council in the UK faces a significant challenge with its email system, with a backlog of nearly one billion emails going back to the 1990s and receiving approximately 200,000 emails every business day. The employees were spending significant time manually sorting emails, impacting their ability to provide direct services. The records management system could have been a lot better, making it challenging to increase transparency, have relevant and timely records for the public, and search for records easily. The document and records management platform is not flexible, ineffective for the profiling process, and not user-friendly. The county's legacy content management system needed help to keep up with the records burden, leading the organization to search for a solution that would work across all departments. Most documents were stored on network drives, making sharing and collaborating on projects between departments a challenge. In addition, searching and retrieving information was very difficult. There were also security challenges due to the limitations of the network drive structure.

Problem Statement

The city council needs help with its information management systems and repositories. First, the organization relied on various tools and solutions, from purpose-built document management tools to informal systems like email inboxes, shared drives, and external storage media. This resulted in information being scattered and difficult to find, leading to a time-consuming process for the record-keeping team. Additionally, manual methods like emails and phone calls were used to track down information, leading to a need for more efficiency and control in the information management process. For example, close to 200 hundred million emails are in their repository. Fulfilling FOI requests is time-consuming and requires multiple departments to hunt down documents. The current process of applying for financial support is slow and requires manual paper handling.

Objectives

Achieve an open and responsive public service to its citizens. Streamline administrative processes, improve employee productivity by enabling faster and more accessible information retrieval, and provide a single, authoritative repository for storing and organizing electronic and physical documents. It also needed a more sophisticated records management solution to manage the classifications and retention schedules of all types of business content.

Create a comprehensive lifecycle management of corporate records and ensure accessible documents, improved efficiencies and reduced risk. Respond to freedom of information (FOI) requests within a set period of time.

Solution

The OpenText Documentum was adopted as the core content repository. Still, the county needed to establish and automate records classification and retention policies as part of its information governance plan. Using OpenText™ Magellan Text Mining, Coforge was able to reduce the volume of records so that they could be searched more quickly and efficiently to solve the county's problem of drowning in emails. With this implementation, the county can meet state-mandated records retention guidelines and achieve cost savings by reducing staff time spent on email searches. The solution also enables the county to efficiently manage and delete old emails while confidently working on all new emails in the future. Furthermore, the OpenText Documentum XCP solution has provided the council workers with streamlined and enhanced information sharing with internal and external stakeholders, which helped the record-keeping team will be able to search for documents and fulfil FOI requests on time efficiently.

Implementing Extended ECM for enhanced information flow between the systems like SAP and Microsoft 365 to fulfil the Freedom of Information (FOI) requests more efficiently and improve the citizen experience by allowing the record-keeping team to search directly in the system. In addition, the Extended ECM integration automates the process of applying for financial support, allowing citizens and businesses to complete their applications online and enabling the teams to process their applications faster and provide higher-quality services.

A single Documentum XCP repository for storing and organizing electronic documents and physical document locations allows the council to manage the classifications and retention schedules of all types of business content to reduce risks and ensure compliance with regulations. The Physical document location module allows for the tracking and managing of physical items such as file folders, paper documents and boxes. The Documentum XCP system currently manages approximately 10,000 boxes in offsite storage.

Conclusion

  • We created a central repository capable of securely storing millions of documents.
  • The solution enabled faster responses to public information requests by accelerating the retrieval of public records.
  • The new content management platform laid a foundation for a streamlined, open and practical approach to sharing information with internal and external stakeholders.
  • Replaced the decentralized processes with an efficient digital workflow, which ultimately improved the speed and transparency of the council's services to individuals and businesses.
  • Detailed logs are maintained for auditing to meet legal compliance and good business practices.
  • Reduce risk by limiting access to essential records, preventing unauthorized modifications, and disposing unnecessary documents.
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