Customer stories

U.S. county government

U.S. county government transforms information governance with automated records classification. Organization optimizes the management of email with OpenText Magellan Text Mining to enhance public service, reduce costs, and ensure compliance

Challenges

  • Serving residents efficiently and transparently by making public documents easily available
  • Inability to easily search through a backlog of nearly one billion emails

Results

  • Automatically classified high volumes of email for storage and disposition

  • Enhanced customer service with faster and more precise content search

  • Improved staff productivity and shifted focus to other value-added tasks

Story

The county wants to serve its residents efficiently and transparently, while cutting overhead costs. This includes making public documents easily available, as mandated by county, state, and federal law—not just traditional formats like meeting minutes or criminal case files but emails as well.

man looking at tablet

We have deleted very few emails ever from the county—we still have email going back to the 1980s. In fact, we have close to a billion emails sitting in our repository right now. Using OpenText Magellan Text Mining, we will be able to reduce the volume of records, so it can be searched more quickly and efficiently.

IT Manager
U.S. county government

The problem: the county was drowning in email. As a digital early adopter, it had a backlog of nearly one billion emails going back to the 1980s.

And its employees sent or received about 300,000 emails every single business day. They were having to spend hours of precious time every week just manually sorting emails when they could have been directly providing services. The IT Manager described the challenges: “Records management has been a big struggle within the county. Recently, we began trying to find a way to properly manage our digital records to increase transparency, to have records that are relevant and timely for the public, and also to make it easier for us when we’re searching records.”

The first step for the county was to replace its legacy content management system, which couldn’t keep up with the records burden. During a competitive bid process to find a solution that would work across all the county’s departments, the organization discovered the OpenText™ content management suite. “At the same time, we also discovered the automated classification solution, OpenText™ Magellan Text Mining. That was really the selling point for OpenText™ because we knew we wanted that follow-on functionality,” the IT Manager recalled.

Two years later, OpenText™ Content Suite is now the core content repository for the county with 750 users already leveraging the solution to control business content throughout its lifecycle. The number of users will eventually reach approximately 1,000, or a third of the county’s employee base. The solution is used by various departments for a wide range of functions such as Tax Assessment, Human Resources, the Prosecuting Attorney, and council meetings.

As the rollout of Content Suite continues in departments across the county, the team has now begun its initiative to establish and automate records classification and retention policies as part of a larger information governance plan. Classifying content helps the organization determine which records must be retained and for how long. OpenText™ Magellan Text Mining provides the automatic identification, classification, retrieval, and archival and disposal capabilities to support that process.

The team is taking a two-step approach to the initiative—first, classify each day’s new emails sent or received, and second, classify all historical email. The IT Manager described the monumental task: “We have deleted very few emails ever—we still have email going back to the 1980s. In fact, we have close to a billion emails sitting in our repository right now. Using OpenText™ Magellan Text Mining, we will be able to reduce the volume of records, so it can be searched more quickly and efficiently.”

The OpenText™ solution helps the county to better manage its records to maintain regulatory compliance, achieve cost savings, improve productivity, and deliver effective government via responsiveness and transparency.

With OpenText Magellan Text Mining assigning the appropriate tags and authority numbers, we can identify the emails that we need to retain, dispose of, or archive, and we can be sure that we are aligned with the State guidelines for records retention.

IT Manager
U.S. county government

One critical benefit is the ability to meet state-mandated guidelines for records retention and disposition. The county has thousands of different retention schedules. For example, its general communication emails have a retention schedule of 2 years – but emails containing legal advice have a retention of 10 years. “With OpenText™ Magellan Text Mining assigning the appropriate tags and authority numbers, we can identify the emails that we need to retain, dispose of, or archive, and we can be sure that we are aligned with the state guidelines for records retention,” noted the IT Manager.

In addition, the team anticipates significant productivity gains and cost savings, by streamlining searches for email records. “We do a significant number of email searches, whether it’s public record requests, e-discovery, or litigation. The big savings will be in reducing staff time spent on searches and improving their efficiency. Many of the staff that do this work have other tasks as well. The OpenText™ solution allows them to focus on their everyday tasks, instead of just responding to records requests,” explained the IT Manager.

The county now has the ability to safely delete old emails and confidently manage all new emails going forward. In fact, it plans to eventually delete around 80% of its emails. The IT Manager commented on how OpenText™ is helping the county deliver more effective government: “By activating the OpenText™ solution, we are drastically reducing the number of our emails, which is exciting for everyone. Our goal is to make relevant information more readily available—we are really excited about that.”

About U.S. county government

This local county government in the United States has a population of 900,000 and provides services ranging from emergency management and the court system to public safety and parks and recreation.