Andy Hill, information services director for the Attorney General's Office (AGO), continues the state's trend of tackling this evolving issue. Hill made electronic records issues a priority when he joined the AGO in 2005. "One of those things was e-mail archiving," he said. "It seemed like the lowest-hanging fruit."
First, the AGO implemented tools that let attorneys and paralegals search attachments in addition to e-mail text. Because there's no limit on mailbox sizes, some inboxes hold gigs of data, Hill said, adding that a filing system developed prior to his arrival was little help.
"I was confident we were spending too much time looking for public records requests," he said. "We're knowledge workers; we're supposed to add value information, not spend time looking for it. That was the business driver."
The next step? Managing e-mails and documents.
"Now we have the opportunity to manage this data in a much more robust way - in a way that you can apply retention schedules to individual documents now," Hill said. "We're working with the secretary of state to figure out moving documents from our e-mail to our vault product, then eventually into the state archives."
