Industry Vertical: Government

The need to manage, access and manipulate information is part of the day-to-day work that most government employees experience. A number of them use manual processes to back up data, creating possible security breaches, and information is not easily discoverable without painful amounts of manual research. When altering documents the issue of version control is also encountered and is especially important in the Government vertical.

Autonomy's solutions offer a centralized, real-time policy management hub to enforce governance control across distributed networks. Key benefits also include automated compliance, and legal hold and disposition management based on the conceptual understanding of information in all file formats. With Autonomy, consistent enterprise retention and disposition policies can be placed across 400+ repositories, archives and operational data. Records are securely managed in a source repository, or centralized, cost-effective storage, which eliminates the need to license costly SQL servers.

Autonomy allows an effective real-time information management and retrieval strategy which ensures security models are maintained so that individuals do not have access to restricted information, avoiding sensitivity issues, whilst allowing for information sharing across Government departments and external agencies. Government's today are under increasing pressure to share information and best practice yet whilst preventing security breaches. Autonomy allows for secure collaboration, helping Government achieve these goals.

Records management underpins many key activities by ensuring that business information is efficiently controlled, and that it is discoverable and quickly accessible. Many government agencies are swamped with unstructured electronic information which is neither properly filed nor securely managed. This huge information asset, 80% of which is held in unstructured form, is often locked inside end-users' desktops and departmental file systems, embedded in collaboration and email systems, and integrated into business processes. This creates a significant challenge for government employees when searching for data across different departments or when trying to ensure that the organization is upholding its obligation to protect citizen information. Autonomy's solutions for records management minimize the manual process of creating records and ensure that corporate retention and disposition policies are followed. Along with protecting the information assets of the organization, the solutions manage content to the highest retention management standards. With Autonomy's archiving solution, government organizations can trust that their information is in secure, managed storage ranging from months to decades, with document-level retention policies and secure disposition.

To increase accountability, promote informed participation by the public, and create economic opportunity, agencies are required to expand access to information by making it available online in open formats and within specific time frames as part of initiatives for more transparency and freedom of information. As part of this project, agencies need to create content and publish it to their websites. This is often a challenge because they are not able to access all of the information that they have. In addition, there are irrelevant and static sites, inconsistent and inaccurate content and their business and knowledge workers are not empowered. Due to this, they are not able to measure success. Autonomy's Web Content Management solutions address these challenges head on.

In addition, online communications are now used more than ever, and a user-friendly website is an important asset to any organization. For government organizations, the ease with which citizens can access online tools is especially important. Citizens have the option of skipping long lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles by ordering a new license plate online. Filing taxes or learning about political candidates are now all actions that are easier done via websites. Meeting these growing expectations is particularly daunting for government agencies that must balance expectations with limited internal resources while complying with governance policies. Autonomy's solutions bring world-class, multichannel interaction analysis, customer engagement, and marketing optimization to the government enterprise. Government agencies can use Autonomy's solutions to easily deploy updates quickly across channels from a single location, and deliver the most relevant targeted content, enhancing usability for citizens. The result is a website that keeps citizens up-to-date with the latest information and ensures they're getting access to necessary tools and resources, whilst ensuring the continued modernization of global Governments.

The DTI iBio team chose Autonomy to automatically aggregate all the disparate information and step around the barriers within government departments to draw together material without having to impinge on the technology within the individual departments. Autonomy's software analyzes patterns and identifies the concepts within information, whatever its format, rather than just searching for keywords. It gains an understanding of the context and meaning of information, allowing it to act upon information in highly complex ways. While keyword dependent technologies are manually intensive to maintain, and provide inaccurate results, Autonomy's unique ability to understand concepts delivers highly accurate, relevant results to users automatically and in real time.

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The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 established the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management OCRWM) within the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). OCRWM was sitting on a huge reservoir of valuable information accumulated over the years, but was unable to make use of it, as it was stored in large legacy databases. More than 500 Lotus Notes, archived geographical records and e-mails, as well as data collected over time from various agencies and news organizations were locked inside these vast database systems. OCRWM needed a way to efficiently process the information and deliver the targeted knowledge therein to those who could use it. In addition, OCRWM needed to connect employees to colleagues of particular expertise to access human knowledge and foster collaboration.

As a result, OCRWM deployed Autonomy's Portal-in-a-Box™. This solution allowed OCRWM to set up and automatically maintain an easy-to-navigate portal with well organized information from legacy databases as well as information in external sources such as news sites. The Department of Energy also has deployments at: Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Office of Policy and International (PI), Knowles Atomic Power Lab (KAPL), and Pacific National Northwest Lab (PNNL)

The Cabinet Office sits at the very center of UK Government and, with the Treasury, provides the ‘head office' of Government. The Cabinet Office has an overarching purpose of making Government work better. The Cabinet Office is one of the UK's most important Government departments with over 1300 staff. The Cabinet Office recognized that corporate knowledge was an important business asset and that it would be beneficial to improve the control of their information.

Autonomy Meridio was chosen as the system that would best meet the requirements of the Cabinet Office. By March 2008 the system was fully rolled out to all 1300 staff. The Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) system uses Autonomy Meridio's standard software integrated with the Cabinet Office's existing Microsoft standard applications including Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook and Exchange. The system is used to store all important document and records within the organization. On average each person currently using the system has filed 200 documents and records; this will grow exponentially over time as the corporate memory store increases.

Result? Users have the ability to save electronic documents, including email, into the electronic fileplan using standard office applications. And documents are simpler to find and share, making it easier for employees to work together and contribute to a growing collaborative working ethos.

The U.S. National Park Service is responsible for providing historic preservation information and training to more than 75 federal agencies, state, tribal and local governments as well as the public at large. To reach everyone involved with federal historic preservation laws, the National Park Service developed the Historic Preservation Learning Portal. The portal serves as a clearinghouse for records and data on historic preservation information and training resources. This requires making relevant best practices, research, regulatory information and training resources readily available and meaningful to those government employees involved in compliance issues.

Meeting this information management challenge proved an enormous task for the National Park Service. For starters, preservation research and training resources are scattered across more than 1,000 federal, state, tribal, educational and non-profit websites. This information comes in more than 250 unique formats, including images and maps, and is loaded with terminology that many government employees are simply not familiar with, making it difficult to locate relevant documents. The U.S. National Park Service launched the Historic Preservation Portal (www.historicpreservation.gov) in 2004 to solve its information dissemination challenges.

Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) is the cornerstone technology of the portal. The National Park Service selected IDOL to index more than 1,000 websites connected to the portal and return meaningful information even if a user's specific query isn't contained in the relevant document.