Enterprise Content Management Helps to Tame Information Growth

A growing population as well as a desire to automate many ofits business processes has led to a dramatic increase in data storage in Horry County, S.C. The need to better manage thegrowing volume of data drove the county to deploy an enterprise contentmanagement (ECM) system, and its $750,000 investment seems to be payingdividends.


Warm weather and beautiful scenery are the main attractionsin Horry County, which is home to Myrtle Beach. Because of its locale, thecounty, which has about 250,000 residents, has been seeing its population rise,up about 30 percent since the turn of the millennium. The growing populationhas meant that the local government has to provide its services (police, fire,building permits, fishing licenses) more effectively.


To support its operations, the county is running Windows onabout 30 Dell servers, which currently manage about 85 TB of information."We will double our storage in the next year," says Tim Oliver, assistantdirector of IT/GIS at the county. The municipal organization, which has 1,700employees, has relied on an IBM AS/400 to support its operations, but has beenmigrating off of it in the last few years. One reason is the county had fewautomated processes, which meant that it generated large volumes of paperdocuments (literally rooms full of them), followed inefficient manual processesand created unnecessary duplication.


As part of the transition to the new servers, the county hasbeen purchasing a series of new applications. In 2006, Horry County boughtCityworks, a work order management system from Azteca Systems Inc. The softwarewas designed to help the municipal government track its assets and streamlineemployees' movements. As it was collecting information about its assets, HorryCounty wanted to store that information in a central repository to let workersquery that data, link maps to documents about the county's water system andmore easily answer questions or solve problems for the local constituents.Azteca Systems, whose product cost $250,000, was designed to work with HylandSoftware's OnBase ECM system, which added another $75,000 to the deploymentcosts. The system was used by a few dozen employees working with about 250 GBof storage.


Initially, the county thought that its ECM would be usedjust for the work order management application. But quickly the potentialbenefits of using an ECM in other departments became clear. Rather than gothrough a formal Request For Proposal (RFP) process, the county decided to seeif it could connect OnBase to other applications.


However, being a local government, the county did not wantto do much custom programming.  Fortunately, OnBase's Application Enablermodule required minimal programming, and the ECM was enhanced so it works withthe Public Works system, Engineering Department applications, and the CourtCase Management system. In addition to streamlining internal processes, thechanges also provided employees with more office space by helping departmentsget rid of paper files.


The latest group to use the ECM is the police department,and its deployment is creating a few challenges. Whenever the police in carsstop residents for questioning, the interaction is recorded. While the OnBasesystem works with video data, the police application raised a few new issues.


The first is storage. The program has been in pilot mode butwill be rolled out to most police cars (the county has 320) in the next year orso, which is one reason why the county expects its storage requirements todouble.
Tracking the video data can also be daunting. "We aresearching for an easy way to catalogue our videos," Oliver says. In someinstances, the video will be later used in a trial, but in many cases it is notneeded and can be discarded. Horry County is trying to find a way to automatethe retention and deletion processes, so employees do not have watch the videowhen they need to find data and to prevent information from being erroneouslyscrapped.


Despite that issue, the county, which has spent $750,000 onit, is content with its ECM system. "Because of OnBase, we are able totrack information more closely and move it around more quickly, which hashelped the country respond to residents' request faster and moreeffectively," Oliver says.