Government agency overcomes Salesforce data challenges and lowers risk with RecordPoint

A state government agency with a wide-ranging mandate faces numerous challenges when it comes to managing information across its diverse departments in its portfolio. In 2020, the agency sought the expertise of RecordPoint due to a significant increase in the adoption of Microsoft Teams and SharePoint and a corresponding growth in data volume.

The agency began with the utilization of RecordPoint as an information governance solution for their SharePoint Online instance. After the successful implementation of the RecordPoint platform to manage SharePoint, it became clear that there was also potential for RecordPoint to assist with compliance requirements for another critical application upon which the agency heavily relied: Salesforce.  

The agency depends on Salesforce to oversee data management in a wide array of projects, within their portfolio.

But while Salesforce’s flexibility makes it useful for teams, each project required its own Salesforce instance, over 20 in total. The result was a growing issue of data sprawl. The agency’s innovation and strategy manager said this increased complexity and made it difficult to manage data throughout its lifecycle properly.  

“These behave like 24 different applications. We need to look at the data models and what we're capturing as records. Some of them are very different from each other.”

Before using RecordPoint, records management tasks were user–driven–the responsibility of all employees, not just the records team–and as a result were not being completed consistently across the workforce.

“Managing records is not the main job employees do. It is something that they could only afford to do if they had spare time. We can't always rely on people to do that,” the innovation and strategy manager said.

This level of inconsistency was impacting compliance. The organization needed to ensure it was records compliant and that customer data was managed appropriately throughout the lifecycle.

Moving to a manage-in-place approach throughout the data lifecycle

Seeing this issue, the agency – already a RecordPoint customer managing SharePoint Online content – sought a solution to manage all its data throughout its lifecycle.  

The RecordPoint Data Trust Platform allowed the IT and records team to connect the most critical Salesforce instances and manage records in place, taking records management off employees’ to-do lists and improving compliance.

RecordPoint means all data and records held in these critical Salesforce instances are classified automatically, with retention labels applied from the start of the data lifecycle. All instances of Salesforce are managed, along with SharePoint Online and other business systems, the innovation and strategy manager said.

“It's the management of those documents sitting in those systems that we were not even aware of because we don't have access to those business systems. We started to get visibility for these Salesforce instances, looking at millions of documents.”

RecordPoint’s machine learning (ML) capabilities, along with rules-based classification, means all records are classified from the beginning of their lifecycle, with appropriate retention schedules established from the start.

No change management is required

Notably, this move did not require Salesforce users to change their workflows or require them to learn new tooling. They were able to continue work in the Salesforce instances they required to complete their projects.

“In a complex organization like ours, change management requires a lot of resourcing and time and effort. So, in this case, all we tell them is your documents are now compliant,” the manager said.

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