City government powers customer-centric transformation with Microsoft Purview Records Management

The City of Marion is a suburban area of Adelaide in South Australia offering an impressive variety of services to its residents. Sorana Dinmore, General Manager of Corporate Services, says, “We provide around 90 services, through a similar number of departments, and manage more than 1.3 billion dollars of assets.” It was exciting to learn how much the city does for the community, but it was also a little daunting when considering the intimidating amount of information generated by all those services, projects, and departments. “Managing all that data is a far more complex problem than I had imagined,” she adds, with a smile.

Information management and the intelligent intranet

Alongside outdated information systems, the City of Marion had time-consuming and resource intensive processes and procedures for information management. Dinmore had her work cut out for her: inconsistent data collection; ad hoc operating procedures; uncoordinated electronic, paper, and voice communications; a largely isolated phone system; and siloed business-critical operations such as payroll, accounting, and CRM. Additionally, administrators had poor visibility into the security of the overall environment.

In February 2019, Sorana returned from a Microsoft Ignite Conference with plenty of ideas for how technology could offer opportunities to transform her department and build a more connected, effective, and streamlined internal operation. “I was excited by a presentation on Microsoft 365 and the intelligent intranet and saw the potential for us and our internal records management,” she says. She brought her ideas to the City of Marion’s technical leadership, the Chief Executive recognized the need for change, and the executive team were onboard when they heard about the Microsoft solution.

Sorana says, “They gave me the go-ahead. So, one of the first things I did was include Karlheins, who was instrumental in what became a broad, transformational information governance effort for the City of Marion.”

Transitioning to Microsoft Purview Records Management

Karlheins Sohl, Records Management (RIM) Team Leader for the City of Marion, had a massive amount of experience in conventional records management, and a facility with technology that enabled him to help identify transformational opportunities and adoption plans.

City of Marion chose to build its transformed infrastructure around Microsoft 365 E5 technologies for modernized communications and collaboration and enhanced cybersecurity, and Karlheins recognized the potential of Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management (previously known as Microsoft  Information Governance) features for his records management modernization project. “This last year of using Microsoft Purview Records Management has brought incredible benefits to the City of Marion and my own professional development. I believe it’s the new industry standard for integrated data and information management,” he says.

Moving from traditional records management products and processes took courage, commitment, and a clear understanding of how the new system can not only cover most existing requirements, but also provide measurable benefits that make the transition effort worthwhile. Compared to conventionally isolated, specialized records management applications and services, Karlheins says his new system builds electronic document and records management systems (EDRMS) features into new and existing workflows. This offers a more holistic approach that allows staff records keeping practices to be done easily and without requiring them to work in an additional and separate system. This has boosted the effectiveness and efficiency of the information staff create and use.

Empowering staff to achieve more

Data administrators and IT staff are freed from the role of gatekeepers for many low-value activities that previously occupied their time as general SharePoint and Teams administration and helpdesk has been transferred to Karlheins’s team. The Microsoft 365 environment provides the tools they need to monitor the information that’s being created, reach out to people if required, and act only when necessary. “I firmly believe Microsoft Purview Records Management enables everyone to become more innovative,” says Karlheins. “When they have an idea to try to something new or improve a process, there are now much fewer barriers.”

Helping his internal customers manage their own information more easily and effectively is key, says Karlheins, for Sorana’s project to increase overall digital literacy and cybersecurity awareness for city council information workers. “It’s always all about the user experience and putting our customers at the center,” he says. RIM is integral to that broader effort and built on the latest digital technologies including Microsoft Azure for cloud capabilities, Microsoft Teams for productivity and communication, Power BI for analytics and data visibility, and Microsoft Intune for device management.

A cultural shift

That transformation, Karlheins says, represents a cultural as much as a technological shift as people become more engaged with the process of creating and handling information, and empowered to take advantage of modernized record and information management services. “People can organize themselves and their workflows in Teams, set up SharePoint sites, create and link all types of information, create their own Power BI reports, and configure workflows. And a government record isn’t restricted to documents or emails anymore. They can now connect all forms of information and create new records far easier. It’s easier, simpler, more integrated, and as an overall result, more compliant.”

Customer Centric Records Management in Action

Karlheins offers a great example of the City of Marion staff taking part in the new RIM solution and seeing immediate benefits. Four neighborhood community centers offer about 96 programs to their community. The staff operated in a largely ad-hoc fashion, using poorly maintained spreadsheets to manage program and participant booking information, and each had their own favored way of logging data. “You have to really know what you’re doing to manage all that information through spreadsheets, and that kind of specialism is not what those folks were hired for.,” he says. So, he spent some time gathering information and identifying essential requirements and built a largely self-service SharePoint site that workers can use to maintain that information, gain insights into program performance, and track all program-related communications.

Karlheins was able to raise visibility which, in turn, helped drive more effective and comprehensive analysis helping staff see which programs were successful and which were not. “And now they can make better resourcing decisions about which programs succeed, what revenue they generate, what capacity that requires, what availability they have across their centers. All of these incredible bits of insight that they previous didn’t have,” he says. “And the truth is it was probably about three weeks’ worth of work for us to better track programs that generate some $5,000 per week in revenue, and we didn’t have to spend a cent. Incredible.”

The new RIM system also helps the City of Marion more easily meet its compliance mandates, providing a single point of truth for information requests. Karlheins says, “For legislative freedom of information requests, the content search function in the Microsoft 365 admin center is unbelievable, the best I’ve ever seen of any system. It covers absolutely everything in the tenancy.” And he appreciates the fact that he can do it all himself, immediately customizing searches, retrieving relevant information, and generating reports without the need to engage a software support specialist. “This is the first time in my entire career I’ve found a RIM tool that I haven’t been able to implement all of its functionality yet, because there’s so much.

A new industry standard for records and information management

“Having a single enterprise product like Microsoft Purview Records Management that can do it all is just tearing up the traditional records industry in a very positive way,” says Karlheins. “Microsoft Purview Records Management is a key component of the City’s digital transformation. It’s really blown traditional government records management out of the water.”  It also helps his team increase efficiency, freeing time for more important projects. Information can be quickly pulled from Microsoft Teams, classified, and managed for its entire lifecycle. “It helps our small team get lots of stuff done, and we don’t need to worry so much about compliance anymore. We can trust the system to help take care of that, while we’re freed to focus on the quality of information and the service we provide to City of Marion staff.”

Karlheins currently has around 1 terabyte of data under management, with 500 SharePoint site collections, 70% percent of these embedded in Teams. He’s a convert to the new RIM solution, so much so that he runs a regular webinar for industry professionals looking to learn from the experience of implementing Microsoft Purview Records Management at the City of Marion. “I can take people through a bunch of different use cases that we see in our organization and how we achieve government records compliance. I can show how it’s working—it’s really working.”

A digital future for the City of Marion

Although the technology itself provides those clear advantages, Karlheins is quick to sing the praises of his boss Sorana Dinmore, noting that it still took her committed, enthusiastic, and accomplished leadership to bring about that change. And Sorana herself says, “This project has been really successful, and it has allowed us not only to push the various teams forward with the Records management technology, but also help them thinking about how they can better work together to make positive changes for the City of Marion.”

The digital transformation is well underway, and the benefits are clear to see. Sorana offers her take on the future for her department, and her hopes for the City of Marion: “What we want to do is turn the City of Marion into a data-driven organization where automation is the norm, and where people have digital literacy, can comfortably manage the information in their charge, and use the best IT resources we can provide—all in service of our residents. I hope everyone will want to live in the City of Marion!”

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