Case Study Examples

The following are case studies of clients we have worked with and identify common issues in managing records and electronic files and the solutions we have provided.

Please contact us if you would like us to improve your records and electronic file management.

This government agency had 35 various shared server drives for their organization. Each drive contained between 50-300 file folders in the first line. Each Office of the agency did not have access to information from other Offices and there was high duplication of files, documents, images and graphics. Through the work of Officiency, records guidance was developed that supported the agencies records policies. Each Office worked with our consultants to develop common file structures and document naming conventions. The 35 drives were consolidated into one master drive for the organization. This process resulted in each Office having one consolidated folder for all their data. Offices could now share data among themselves and file server space was reduced by half.

This organization had implemented multiple cloud-based document and content management solutions, in the hope to improve record management of the organization. However, no guidance was issued on what type of files to store in which location or how to file or name records, and there was a lack of structure within the cloud based systems. Thus, the cloud-based systems either went un-used, or new unstructured systems were created which further confused staff. It was found that over 80 percent of the staff kept their data on their C drives or their personal drives on the network, in lack of knowing where to put records on the shared drive or the cloud-based systems. Officiency worked with this organization to develop guidance on how best to use the shared drive with these cloud-based systems and define the type of records and use with each system. We worked with each department of the organization to design a file structure and taxonomy so users were able to move necessary data from personal drives to the proper electronic central repository.

This non-profit had a shared drive that was unused. The staff was not using the common shared drive due to a lack of file structure and guidance in. Instead staff was keeping electronic data on their C drives, which were neither backed-up nor accessible to other staff. Information was lost regularly due to employees leaving the organization and IT removing data from their C drives or users not being able to locate information in their email systems. Essentially there was no common or shared repository to store electronic records. Officiency worked with this agency to develop a file structure, system and process of managing records on the shared drive. Each staff moved relevant files from C drives to the new structure on the Shared Drive. This enabled staff to have better collaboration and also provided a launching point to implement SharePoint as a collaboration and records management system.