Success Story:   Township Police Department

Enterprise Content Management Implementation Enhances Knowledge Sharing and Improves Document Management

The Challenge

While many businesses struggle to keep up with technology, there are few organizations that consistently lag behind the technology curve as do police departments. In the case of the Upper Darby Police Department, the reasons varied from a lack of funding, to a lack of vision for technical growth, as well as not having the right technical resources to implement the required changes effectively.

The area of enterprise content management was one in which they knew they needed help. Upper Darby Police Department's ECM consisted primarily of an ever growing file server repository of unmanaged files, the occasional internal email blast and an antiquated macro driven “document management system" written in VBA utilizing Microsoft Word '97.

While their file server configuration offered limited organization of files across departments, organization of files within departments varied greatly. No enterprise search capabilities existed. The searching abilities of their document management system were limited at best. With the accumulation of over a decade’s worth of files, unless a user knew almost exactly what they were looking for, it was unlikely they would find it any other way. Emails were often used to disseminate company wide notifications. While initially effective, emails were either deleted, filed away or “lost” in an ever growing inbox and were rarely seen again. Their document management system, while notable for being written internally and serving them for a number of years, was sorely outdated and prevented the department from upgrading to a more current version of Microsoft office due to its’ tight coupling with the Word’97 programming object model.