Prepress
The City of London Selects Open Text to Deliver Corporate-Wide Records Management and Archiving
Tuesday 07. October 2008 - The Solution Will Provide A Single, Trusted Source of Information to Help Improve Services and Efficiency
Open Text Corporation (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTC), a global leader in enterprise content management (ECM), today announced that The City of London Corporation has selected Open Text to provide a comprehensive corporate records management and archiving solution.
The City of London Corporation is responsible for the needs of its residents, businesses and over 340,000 people who come to work in the downtown offices everyday, creating vast quantities of both physical and electronic documents and records. Among bodies that provide local authority services, the City of London Corporation is unique; with over 800 years of history it is the oldest local-authority entity in the country. The organization takes pride in combining its ancient traditions and ceremonial functions with the role of a modern and efficient local authority.
The volume of information that must be securely managed required the City of London Corporation in February 2006 to embark upon a project to identify a robust, scalable and economically viable solution to meet their needs. They needed a solution that would enable them to deliver better services to the hundreds of thousands of residents, visitors and businesses they interact with daily, as well as to create a better working environment for staff.
Roger Marshall, IS Director at the City of London Corporation commented: “In planning a major building refurbishment, which involved the decanting of existing archives, we engaged a consultant to advise us on how we should manage our archiving moving forward. He proposed we should not just archive new documents, but also digitize them by implementing an electronic document and records management system. We saw this as an opportunity not to just change the way we archive documents, but also improve our business processes.”
The City of London Corporations existing systems didnt enable employees to share information with ease, resulting in duplication of files and time wasted searching for the right information. The result was an overall decrease in efficiency amongst staff, as the volume of information continued to grow. A new solution was required that could deliver both digital archiving as well as corporate-wide records management.
Following a rigorous two-year tendering process, Open Text was selected in June 2008 and the City of London Corporation plans to start deploying the solution this month. Roger commented: “Throughout the tendering process we reviewed a number of the leading vendors in the market, all of which offered basically what we needed. We chose Open Text because it was the most user-friendly. This was essentially what tipped the balance for us.”
Roger concluded: “We see Open Text as the answer to helping us meet a common corporate standard in line with the governments National Best Practice Scheme and eventually leading to one single source of truth, eliminating the duplication of both electronic and physical files. Eventually we hope the solution will reduce the need for paper based files and ultimately bring greater efficiencies, which will reflect in the service we offer our residents.” Simon Lill, Open Texts Sales Director for the Public Sector in the UK commented: “It is a real privilege to be working with one of the oldest and most prestigious councils in the country. We hope that through the implementation of Livelink ECM, the City of London Corporation will be able to continue to offer a great level of service to its residents for a further 800 years.”