Problem background
A local county council office employs multiple Line of Business (LOB) applications to manage its operations and services, including financial management, human resources, and citizen relationship management. However, using these systems creates multiple content issues, including siloed information stored differently in each application, making it difficult to share and access data across departments and case teams. The rise in duplicate information leads to inconsistencies and errors. Furthermore, a lack of standardization in different LOB applications is becoming increasingly expensive due to the explosive growth of electronic documents and no means to enforce retention periods and disposition rules on paper documents. It led to increased costs and widened the opportunity for legal problems. Maintaining the citizen’s records needed a solution for the county to enforce retention periods and designate certain documents as records.
Problem Statement
Accessing work documents from multiple siloed systems, inconsistent naming conventions and metadata standards, and limited search functionality make it difficult for the county council to manage and access the information they need effectively. The county office needs a solution that can provide a unified view of their information, regardless of where it is stored. This solution should allow for seamless access to documents, effective searching and retrieval, and the ability to manage documents across systems consistently and efficiently and enable the workers to refrain from using multiple LOB applications to complete their work in the source business application instead of switching between various applications to do their job. In addition, the new regulations and policies around, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the UK, make the county council office needs to comply with relevant laws and regulations and implement proper records management policies and procedures to protect the confidentiality and security of citizens' information and applying new approaches such as 'right to erase' and 'right to be forgotten' complying legal obligations and claims.
Challenges
- Siloed workgroups sharing content from different media
- Uncontrolled information flow, paper documents
- Unclassified documents, inability to find records, duplicate documents
- Exposure to legal risk due to no retention policy and lack of assurance for disposition
- High storage costs that continue to multiply
Solution
Coforge has implemented a custom solution on OpenText's Documentum Records Manager, an ECM and EDRMS system, to manage the flow of information. Several thousand users within the county council use this platform, which started as a document management solution but has expanded its functionality for records management and a unified platform for all their content management needs. The platform helps the county council to manage content, assign responsibility and record type, and manage retention requirements automatically. Content created by different business groups via different systems is easily accessible to others, helping to increase transparency and accountability within the county office. The county council improved its paper records management by integrating the Documentum platform with OpenText Intelligent Capture. With Intelligent Capture, documents are scanned and tagged with metadata for storage in Documentum, which provides secure storage, role security, versioning, and easy search and retrieval for users.
Conclusion
With the constant evolution of regulations, legislation and business requirements, government organizations are looking towards a distributed records management model where content creators are responsible for proper classification, disposition and user-friendly solutions that integrate smoothly into the modern workflow, allowing for an efficient and effective records management process to achieve the following.
- Controlled documents and records management
- Retention policies and legal holds.
- Simple classification process for new content
- Improved compliance
