Managing Municipal eRecords A Case Study

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Managing Municipal e-Records A Case Study
Bob GuzSr. Business Systems AnalystCity of
Austin
IIMC Annual ConferenceMay 22, 2009
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Project Overview
Enterprise Document and Imaging Management System
(EDIMS)
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City of Austin

• Capital of Texas
• Approximately 800,000 citizens
• 1.5 million in greater metro area
• 11K 12K City employees
• City government responsible for wide varietyof
  operations
• Administration of City government
• Police, Fire, and EMS departments
• Public utilities (electric, water, solid waste)
• International Airport

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EDIMS Project Objectives
Enterprise Document and Imaging Management System

• Implement Open Texts Livelink ECM eDOCS DM/RM,
  BI, Kofax Ascent Capture, and EMC Centera
• Replace legacy document management systems
• Enforce compliance with mandated records
  retention requirements

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EDIMS Project Objectives

• Make public records readily accessible to
  citizens, their elected officials, and to City
  staff
• Provide common platform for image capture, and
  document/records management for City departments
  and operations

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EDIMS Project Deployment

• Strategic rollout, staged department by
  department
• Prioritization of departments based on
  cost-benefit analysis
• Prioritization of document types based on
  established corporate criteria
• Focus on structured documents, with plans to
  expand to unstructured documents

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COA Corporate Criteria Examples

• Public records subject to Open Records requests
• Records associated with well defined workflows
  and business processes
• Records that have a high retrieval or reference
  activity
• Documents that require collaboration and
  coordination across multiple departments
• Records with lengthy retention requirements

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Examples

• Public records associated with City Council
  activities and decisions
• Financial and other filings by officeholders,
  PACs, and candidates for public office
• Birth and death certificates
• Board and Commission appointment process and
  training programs
• Standard operating procedures
• Contracts and related attachments and amendments

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Document and Records Management in Open Text
eDOCS
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(No Transcript)
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Deployment
Master
Browsers
OCC
OVR
Public
Dept.
Dept.
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The File Plan
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The File Plan

• Provides a structured hierarchy for an
  organizations documents/records
• Classification and Lifecycle Management
• Provides containers in which documents/records
  are classified
• File Plan containers are associated with records
  management rules
• When a document is filed in the system, it
  inherits classification, access permissions, and
  retention rules
• City policy requires all documents to be filed
  in the File Plan

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Our Goal Develop a File Plan that

• Addresses both physical and electronic records
• Establishes consistent granularity and complexity
  across the enterprise
• Distinguishes the File Plan from an ever-shifting
  organizational structure
• Acknowledges that different departments may be
  responsible for records that support the same
  activity
• Leverages the automation capabilities of
  OpenText eDOCS

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COA File Plan

• Business Functions
• Broad categories (big buckets) of similar
  business processes
• Record Classes
• Records that support the parent Business Function
  but have different retention requirements
• Record Series
• Having same retention requirements i.e., are
  governed by the same disposition authority
• Have one official retention period and one
  custodian of record
• Level at which business rules are applied

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File Plan Excerpt
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Files and File Parts

• Specific locations in which documents are
  filed
• Files are organized to align with the retention
  rule associated with the parent container
• Examples
• A known event plus a period of time (e.g.,
  calendar year end 5 years) Organize by year,
  set event to end of year
• A conditional event plus a period of time (e.g.,
  end of contract 10 years) organize by
  contractor name or contract number, set event to
  end of contract date

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Files and File Parts
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File Plan Components
Building Retention Rules
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Events When does it happen?

• Date-based triggers that can be used as the
  starting point for a variety of actions
• Examples
• Immediately upon a known event (e.g., election
  day)
• A known event plus a period of time (e.g.,
  calendar year end 5 years)
• A conditional event plus a period of time (e.g.,
  end of contract 10 years)

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Actions What happens?

• Storage Actions
• Define if and when an item must be moved from an
  Active Location to an Inactive/Off-line Location
• Cutoff/Rollover Actions
• Define when to close files and open new files
• Disposal Actions
• Define the final disposition of records
• Example Permanent, Destruction, or Transfer

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Business Records Rule

• Event Action Records Rule

• Immediately following an election (Event)
• Close the current election file for candidate
  ballot applications and associated documents
  (Cutoff Action)
• Declare ballot applications and associated
  documents as records (Cutoff Action)
• Two years after file closure, delete the records
  (Disposal Action)

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Sample Business Records Rule
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Records Destruction Processing

• Procedure executed annually (Q1)
• Identify records eligible for destruction
• Route candidate report to custodian of record
• Suspend destruction, place legal hold on records,
  as required
• Execute destruction process
• Generate Certificate of Destruction and file in
  system as a permanent record

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Public Access
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Council Meeting Information Center

• www.ci.austin.tx.us/cityclerk/edims/council_meetin
  g_info_center.htm

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Council Meeting Information Center

• Provides a "one-stop" source for City Council
  meeting records

• Agendas
• Approved meeting minutes
• Meeting videos and closed caption transcripts
• Executed ordinances and resolutions
• Workpapers, drafts, and other documents presented
  to the Council during meetings

• Brings together documentation that was previously
  difficult to find because it was scattered across
  the City's website in multiple locations

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Council Meeting Information Center

• Supports the City Council's goal to increase
  transparency in government, making information
  available to citizens more quickly and
  conveniently
• All records are full-text indexed
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on scanned
  images
• Supports keyword content searching
• ADA compliance
• For historical research, minutes of Council
  meetings are available online, 1880 - present
• Currently averaging 100K documents downloaded
  per month via the public website

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Public AccessDemonstration
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Search Options
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Search Results
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Thank you!
Bob GuzSr. Business Systems Analystbob.guz_at_ci.au
stin.tx.us