All organizations have to manage digital and paper records, with the level of complexity increasing for larger entities. In the federal government, large departments and agencies can have millions of records — if not more — to store, organize, protect and access.
One such agency processes millions of benefit cases annually, creating hundreds or, sometimes, thousands of pages of documents for each case.
Previously, the agency did most of this processing on paper, leading to staggering numbers of pages. Now, however, it has moved to Hyland Alfresco as its digital content and records repository.
— Kevin Dorr, Alfresco Architect, CGI Federal
Built on open standards and application programming interfaces (APIs), Alfresco is easy to integrate and customize. That was crucial as CGI Federal — a U.S.-based technology and professional services company — worked with the federal agency to build and develop APIs that fit business use cases and allowed the agency to add multiple layers of data validation.
Other key factors that the agency found compelling included:
The ability to automatically identify and declare records in a person-centric manner across multiple cases and systems in a federally compliant manner was a key factor in the agency’s choice of Hyland. With individuals tied to multiple cases, the disposition of a person’s complete record is dependent on many variables that may change over time. Alfresco adapts the retention rules accordingly without any human interaction.
Alfresco provides a flexible, object-oriented information model. This capability enables more complex relationships between components than the simple tree-based hierarchy that most platforms offer.
Alfresco provides versatility and scalability, making it highly amenable to customizations that enable it to change as needed to meet evolving goals.
“In terms of reliability and scalability, I think it’s just a great platform,” said Kevin Dorr, an Alfresco architect at CGI Federal.
The agency has deployed Alfresco as a content engine that provides multiple key processes for the agency’s constituents and stakeholders. The Hyland solution serves as a back end for the agency’s records viewer. Tens of thousands of users — spanning multiple agencies across the U.S. government — have access to the viewer when they need to look up a specific person or case.
Millions of forms, along with supporting evidence, are stored in the records repository. All told, Alfresco houses more than 500 million documents.
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When applicants file their documents online, they can submit updates and check the status of their cases. Case workers field fewer calls as a result. Additionally, with several benefit case types fully digital, businesses submit applications directly on behalf of their people.
A person can account for multiple cases over time. For example, a person creates a case when they first apply for a benefit from the agency. As they later revise or expand existing benefits, or request benefits for family members, they create more cases. The full picture of a person’s record may evolve over decades.
While each case has its own case file, the federal agency, with the help of CGI Federal and Hyland, is creating a person-centric view of a person’s complete record that will make it easier to find information spanning an individual’s entire history across multiple cases.
The digital process makes it easier for applicants to access the information they need. Case adjudicators also can operate much more efficiently when the information is available digitally, rather than waiting for a bulky paper record to be shipped between offices.
The use of digital records allows case adjudicators to quickly look across a person’s record and other related records to identify inconsistencies and build a full picture. This leads to better identification of fraud and improved decisions overall.
Work is being done faster, and cases are getting resolved sooner. That’s been especially helpful for resolving the benefit case backlog, as well as the high volume of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for those cases that the agency receives. Reviewers can now quickly review a file and prepare properly redacted FOIA responses.
CGI Federal developed a specialized, encrypted content store that they plugged into Alfresco’s open architecture. The specialized content store has an API that the agency’s Security Operations Center (SOC) can directly access to determine if there has been a classified data spill. If so, the SOC can quickly remediate the spill through an API, all in compliance with federal standards.
> Learn more | Improve government efficiency with open-source content management
The digital process goes beyond helping make informed decisions. Future historians will be able to locate and retrieve records from a digital records repository.
“These are permanent records. And they’re permanent records because they have historical value,” said Laurence Hart, a vice president in CGI Federal’s National Security and Justice business unit. “We want to make sure that future historians can understand how the people of today lived and allow them to build a more accurate and richer story about their past.”
CGI Federal plans to continue working with the federal agency to further automate its processes. Many people still submit applications on paper forms, and ongoing work to automate the ingestion of that data will further streamline operations. The addition of intelligent document processing (IDP) to this process will speed up the ingestion of new records, allowing for more accurate adjudications for benefit applicants.
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