Summary
Wake County is one of the largest and fastest growing counties in North Carolina. With more than 5,000 employees, and a population of more than 1 million people, the county manages numerous records within its various departments.
“It really is like working at 12 different companies,” Becky Pezzoni, Wake County’s Enterprise Records Manager said.
There were challenges. Before 2022, the county’s records retention schedule had more than 3,000 record series, and a dozen different retention schedules. There was also widespread duplication across those 12 schedules published by the State Archives.
“The general schedule records series were repeated in every single functional schedule — and each of the 12 schedules were individual PDF documents and not in a database,” Pezzoni said. “For ease of use, we had to copy and paste everything into a spreadsheet.”
Then there were the widespread formatting issues. Row by row, and cell by cell, the many record series had multiple retention rules.
It was apparent the county needed an intuitive records retention schedule solution.
A New Solution + Favorite Features
Wake County became fans of Zasio after meeting at a professional records management conference. Pezzoni and Records Analyst Lisa Coombes also attended Zasio webinars and received personal referrals, which praised Zasio’s software solutions and customer support.
In 2022, the county purchased Versatile Retention (now known as Versatile 2023 with Retention Schedule Management). Zasio’s software was the clear winner compared to other vendors.
“Honestly, it was the simplicity of (Versatile) and the value for the money (compared to other software solution providers),” Pezzoni said. “I was able to compare the time and number of clicks it took to find a specific record series in the official PDF published versions on the web, vs. Excel, vs. Versatile, and it was clearly so much easier and user-friendly.”
Pezzoni appreciates Versatile’s searching functionality and having schedules in one place.
“It’s nice to have the user-defined fields so we can easily find records series with multiple disposition rules or agency-defined rules (for future simplification),” Pezzoni said.
She also likes how users can document exceptions to the published retention rules where there’s a justifiable business need to retain a particular series of records longer than required by the State. This is also helpful where the State Archives allow local governments to set ‘agency policy’ retention rules based on business needs. “Now we have one easily searchable source of the truth for our agency-driven rules! Information is stored in a UDF (user-defined field) so that it’s not just in some director’s memory, it’s official,” Pezzoni said.
Technical Support + Implementation
Zasio Software Support Specialist Andrew Serna worked with the county to implement Versatile.
“First of all, we think Andrew is amazing,” Pezzoni said. “He was our guy! He sat down with us and made it very simple.”
During implementation, Andrew tested the information received and ensured data was successfully imported. “It was very collaborative and pretty quick and easy,” Pezzoni said.
Transitioning from spreadsheets and copy/paste methods to using Versatile to manage the county’s retention schedule was like night and day.
“It’s much easier than having to go and do a ‘Find All’ (in Excel),” Coombes said. “When you’re looking for things (in Versatile) it will all pull up on one page.”
Results
Purchasing Versatile 2023 with Retention Schedule Management gave Wake County a modern and reliable solution. The days of duplication and formatting errors are gone, and the team has analytics to show improved efficiency.
“From the traffic I can see on our dashboard, I would estimate we are saving time — close to a day each month (compared to the prior spreadsheet scenario),” Pezzoni said. “But it means more to us than saving time. The value we see in ‘teaching people to fish’ will pay off as our records management program at Wake County continues to mature.”
When deploying Versatile to additional users, Wake County said the general reception was very positive. Prior to Versatile, Pezzoni and Coombes received frequent messages from employees with the same question, “What’s the retention on this record?”
Thanks to Versatile, the number of inquiries has decreased. Pezzoni is pleasantly surprised by how many staff are using the software on their own and no longer need to inquire.
“The silence is golden. I’m a huge proponent of working myself out of a job,” Pezzoni said.
Performance and reliability, along with exceptional customer service, and Versatile’s overall affordability, established a winning recipe and continued partnership.
“We have other software products that aren’t nearly as straightforward, easy to work with, or as affordable as Versatile. Being in government, you don’t always have those funds, so we appreciate the value,” Pezzoni said.
About Zasio
Zasio has over 35 years of service in information governance. We help businesses get started in records management and maintain top-of-the-line IG programs. To do this, we’ve recruited a team of expert software developers and technicians, legal experts, and highly-accomplished records analysts—all in-house!
Our highly trained team includes certified records managers, information governance professionals, and certified information privacy professionals who keep up with evolving IG trends and scale our Versatile solutions to meet our customers’ needs. It’s no wonder that thousands of organizations, including half of the top 20 Fortune 500 companies, have trusted our software solutions and expert consulting services to create world-class information governance programs.
To learn more about Versatile 2023 with Retention Schedule Management, call 800-513-1000 opt. 1 or email connect@zasio.com.