Digby, Nova Scotia embraces the cloud

The town of Digby, Nova Scotia is, without question, a beautiful place. Digby has breath-taking views of the Annapolis Basin, famous locally harvested scallops and was once named the most romantic town in Canada. This beauty, however, did not extend to their records management process.

Digby employed a very inefficient process for retrieving information. It had an antiquated paper-based records management system which had been in place for a number of years. It could take as long as half a day to find the correct documents during a search and employees weren’t able to serve citizens and counselors effectively. Digby was facing a number of problems due to this: 

• Slow response times to constituent inquiries and freedom of information requests;
• Valuable employee time spent on document searches instead of engaging in municipality improving tasks;
• Facing possible legal action because of the risk of non-compliance with provincial and federal records management and FIPPA regulations;
• No centralized repository or filing system meant that files could be anywhere and with anyone meaning files could be easily damaged or compromised too;
• Both employees and citizens expressed frustration with the system – the employees because they had to spend hours looking for files and the citizens because of the delayed response times.

Susan Rice, the Executive Assistant for the town of Digby, had the following to say about their system: “Depending on the request, to retrieve a motion or document on a certain topic, for instance, we would need to determine the year and month the document was produced and if it was stored manually or electronically. Finding the correct document could take several hours or more, sometimes half a day”.

These problems were hampering Digby’s ability to run its government so it decided to look for a solution. Digby knew that Ricoh was the market leader in this field and that Ricoh had worked with local governments across Canada in addressing similar challenges – Digby chose Ricoh. We then did what we do best, created a more efficient, effective and environmentally-friendly system. Ricoh implemented our Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution for the city as follows: 

• Digital. We digitized versions of the government’s paper records. Employees can now search for and retrieve documents within minutes, instead of hours; 
• Extremely secure. Ricoh’s system is architected so that only employees with access can view records;
• Mobile-friendly. Records can be accessed by authorized employees through any web-enabled device. This means that they can work from their phones as well as on their own laptops and tablets;
• Scalable. Digby only pays for the storage that it needs at the current time. If needs grow then the system grows too. This scalability ensures that they aren’t wasting money on unused storage.

Ricoh’s ECM solution has been a great success for the town of Digby. In the words of Susan Rice, “This system is so much more convenient,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to think of going back.”