When a new energy corporation was formed through the merger of nine smaller utilities, electronic documents were found scattered across 20 servers, and countless personal computers. Managers complained that they could not go on leave without getting desperate calls regarding the location of key documents. Something had to be done.Using a.k.a.® software, a new harmonized taxonomy was developed, together with a thesauru that linked preferred terms to non-preferred and related terms.
Using a.k.a.® software, terminology was collected from the former entities then merged and harmonized into a single taxonomy (classification scheme). A thesaurus was built linking preferred terms to non-preferred (obsolete) and related terms.
The new taxonomy was uploaded into all major network drives across 20 servers. The matching thesaurus was published to the intranet enabling users to search for their terms and be lead to the new preferred term.
With these tools, the records management team took to the road, visiting each office to train staff on the new taxonomy. Over the next year documents on the hard drives reduced by over 75% as sharing lead to the elimination of multiple copies.