Challenge

The Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) of the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) of the Government of the District of Columbia (the District) was evaluating Freedom of Information Act (FIOA) cloud-based software solutions. They wanted a solution that would allow them to move from their legacy Salesforce FOIA solution to a much more robust FOIA solution with an external portal, integrated redaction, reporting, electronic delivery, etc.

The customer’s Salesforce solution was lacking several key FOIA requirements to include exemptions, redactions, searching, and reporting functionality. Each of these fundamental functions were needed daily, which made processing FOIA requests inefficient for the FOIA Officers and FOIA Approvers thus delaying the time it took for citizens to receive the requested information.

In addition, these inefficiencies increased their backlog of requests and forced government operators to create complicated and disconnected workarounds to support their needs as part of their Salesforce solution.

Solution

Armedia offered a FedRAMP Compliant and complete cloud-based solution leveraging ArkCase FOIA that removed the need for any workarounds and automated processes to aid DC OCFO in being more productive ArkCase FOIA exceeded the OCFO’s FOIA requirements, by offering value-added features to include:

• Dashboard – personalized dashboard to provide KPIs to leadership
• Annotations and Redaction – integrated redaction with tracking of exemption codes per document
• Task Management – automated task to provide tracking of assignments
• Contacts Management – ability to manage people and organizations associated with each request
• Searching – ability to search and discover previous FOIA requests to reduce time
• Reporting – integrated reporting capability to generate monthly, quarterly and annual reports
• Notifications – ability to receive emails on request or task assignments
• Subscription – ability to subscribe to FOIA request so the user can receive notifications on changes
• Tagging – ability to add tags to Requests and documents to aid in discovery
• Cost Tracking – ability to track expenses associated with each request
• Time Tracking – ability to track time and bill rate for each request
• Administrative Configuration – ability to configure the application through the Admin Console

Results

The Government of the District of Columbia partnered with Armedia to utilize ArkCase FOIA and configure it to meet all their detailed requirements. The implementation, training, user acceptance testing, and go-live was completed in less than 3 months.

The Office of the Chief Financial Officer has decreased their backlog and processed 50% more FOIA requests in the first 5 months, compared to previous years, leveraging ArkCase FOIA.