2012 NASCIO Recognition Award Nomination
Pennsylvania Treasury Department
Bureau of Information Technology Solutions
Title: Email Retention – Cultural Challenge Conquered Category: Fast Track Solutions
Contact: PN Narayanan
Chief Information Officer
Pennsylvania Treasury Department G-22 Finance Building
Harrisburg, PA 17120 Phone (717) 787 8726
Email: [email protected]
Project initiation and completion dates:
Initiation: 11/21/2011 Completion: 04/30/2012
2. Executive Summary
The Pennsylvania Treasurer’s Department, headed by elected State Treasurer Rob McCord, manages and invests the commonwealth’s financial assets and serves as a fiscal watchdog, ensuring that tens of billions of dollars in state payments are lawful and correct. It operates innovative programs that generate positive returns for taxpayers and improve the economic security of Pennsylvanians. The Treasury is committed to
efficient, productive and transparent operations.
Pennsylvania Treasury processes about 48.7 million payments totaling $78.2 billion annually. The 400-employee agency uses the Microsoft Exchange email system to
communicate and conduct business. In the past, Treasury had never imposed size limits on mailboxes or implemented an effective retention policy. Treasury’s email system was neither designed nor intended to be a records storage system. But, like any system or process, over a period of time the original objective had been lost.
Many Treasury employees had numerous messages in their Inboxes, Sent Items, and Deleted Items folders, which took up large amounts of space on Treasury’s servers. Many of these emails contain transitory information relating to Treasury business – e.g.,
descriptions of past events that had long been superseded by subsequent developments, thank you messages and similar social niceties, calendar information shared for scheduling purposes or to establish milestones – that had little or no enduring value for the department or for the persons engaged in the exchanges of this content. Very few of these emails contained information that would constitute a record that must be maintained under any retention guideline or law.
Without an effective retention policy and the necessary enforcement of that policy, the technology department faced numerous challenges, including storage, backup and
recovery, as well as compiling responses to public information and e-discovery requests. While preservation of emails for ready access is desired; Inboxes, Sent Items, and Deleted Items folders are not the best choices to store this content.
Treasury’s Bureau of Information Technology Solutions (BITS) worked closely with the legal and human resources departments to create an email retention policy. The BITS, with Microsoft’s support, provided a technical solution with the use of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. A dedicated change management team managed the cultural change. The
departments continued to work closely to execute the plan of implementation and begin enforcement of the policy in less than 6 months.
Successful implementation in such a short time has reduced the mailboxes by 43% and reduced backup time and storage requirements. The solution has also provided Treasury with e-discovery tools such as the capability to search and store emails based on keywords; that function has been delegated to the legal department.
3. Business Problem and Solution Description
Treasury’s mailboxes contained decades worth of email messages that were obsolete, non-relevant, and duplicative in nature. There was no official policy for retention and disposal; even calendar entries were kept. Many mailboxes were larger than 1 GB and some were more than 10 GB. This placed considerable strain on scarce Treasury infrastructure and other resources.
Backup, recovery, and discovery were very painstaking operations. The culture of “saving it forever” had propagated throughout the organization and it was a significant challenge to change that mindset. Every bureau had its own rationalization for keeping email forever, even though in many cases the same data was available and readily accessible in other places like databases, network drives, and SharePoint workspaces.
Initiation and Planning
Recognizing the seriousness of these issues, BITS collaborated with the legal and human resources departments to come up with a policy and an action plan for its enforcement. This collaboration gave BITS a significant advantage by allowing it to attain the “buy in” of
executive staff members.
The new policy provided guidelines for the retention of mail and calendar entries, including a maximum retention period.
With clear requirements, BITS began working on the technical solution using Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. (BITS upgraded Treasury PCs and laptops to Windows 7 and Office 2010 in 2011).
BITS created managed folders with 1-, 3-, and 7-year retention periods. With the help of Microsoft, the team was also able to write retention scripts.
The change management team worked with bureau directors to set the transition schedule and split the project into seven phases.
Execution
The human resources department issued the new email retention policy and an information sheet about the project to all Treasury employees. The helpdesk team created training materials and the change management team scheduled employees for training 60 days prior to the execution date. This allowed users ample time to plan for archiving their email to the appropriate directory.
Timeline
11/7/2011 7/2/2012
12/1/2011 1/1/2012 2/1/2012 3/1/2012 4/1/2012 5/1/2012 6/1/2012 7/1/2012
Pennsylvania Treasury Department
Email retention policy implementation timeline.
11/21/2011 Policy announcement - HR 1/30/2012 Group 1 2/13/2012 Group 2 3/5/2012 Group 3 3/19/2012 Group 4 4/2/2012 Group 5 11/7/2011 HR- Directors meeting 4/16/2012 Group 6 12/1/2011 - 1/30/2012 60 day preparation 4/30/2012 Group 7 7/2/2012 Retention on Managed folders Technical Solution
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 incorporates e-discovery functions that were unavailable in previous versions. Anticipating the need for e-discovery and future retention challenges, BITS implemented Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 as part of its Treasury Modernization and Transformation program.
Message Retention Management was enhanced with the release of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 SP1. Treasury used this functionality to create managed folders with
customized retention policies. In our case, we created three folders for all employees with 1-, 3-, and 7-year retention periods. Microsoft Support was instrumental in the final
implementation of our retention policy and described a strategy by which Treasury could also include calendar appointments in its managed folder policy. During the user training period, employees could move essential emails to the new managed folders. Treasury could plan the policy implementation easily for each organizational unit using PowerShell scripts. A messaging attendant was enabled on the Exchange servers to scan all user mailboxes daily, so that the retention policy would remain accurate and timely. Training users on the various features in Outlook 2010 not only helped to clean-up mailboxes, but also fostered organization and mastery of their mailbox contents.
4. Significance
The growth rate of Treasury email accounts was not sustainable and posed an enormous challenge for recovery in the case of a disaster. Considering a majority of email data was duplicated in other systems and mailboxes contained messages that were not classified as records, it posed a huge burden on Treasury’s infrastructure and strain on scarce
administrative resources. An effective and efficient policy and procedure will help to avoid these long-term storage and recovery problems. Considering BITS lost 25% of staff in the last three years due to retirements and hiring restrictions, it became a necessity to find the most efficient way to implement this change.
5. Benefits of the Project
A quick implementation helped to significantly reduce the strain of executing such large changes across the organization. In addition, the e-discovery feature of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 enabled BITS to reduce the amount of time it takes to fulfill the legal team’s requests for information; a keyword search or email hold on specific boxes or across the department is now not only feasible, but very simple and easy.
The following graph shows how Treasury reduced the collective size of its mailboxes by 43% as a result of the project.
Though this project is not innovative from the perspective of the technology used, it certainly deserves credit for the change management and teamwork involved in effecting such a significant change in organizational culture. The previous lack of a policy had made the “digital pack rat” mentality pervasive among Treasury employees and its various bureaus and offices. From the beginning, BITS worked very closely with the legal and human resources departments, as well as designated “change agents” in each bureau and a
change coordinator assigned to the project to communicate clearly and effectively. It was not easy to change employees’ mindsets about what should be kept and for how long. The change management and helpdesk teams created job aids and training materials that are simple to understand and used games like “Jeopardy!” to engage users in the learning process. 0 50 100 150 200 250 300
Benefits of this project include:
1. Reduced storage and infrastructure needs
2. Faster and simpler e-recovery and e-discovery
3. Reduced time for recovery in case of a disaster
4. Helped Treasury to test its change management structures and communication
