Fast-tracking Freedom of Information requests
Challenge
How to reduce the increasing burden (cost and time) that Freedom of Information (FOI) and other requests for information place on government workers.
Outcome
Frisk Enterprise Search was deployed to improve the efficiency and accuracy of information-gathering requests within the Department for Education.
Background
For the Cyber Security Team at the Department for Education, the volume of Freedom of Information (FOI) and other information requests was on the rise.
The business challenges
Without an effective and efficient way to locate the information required to fulfil these requests, an increased burden was placed on the department.
Fulfilling each request was time consuming and costly.
Existing infrastructure placed emails into a single archive where individual files could not be extracted, and legacy cloud storage limited data transfers.
The Frisk solution
Next-gen technologies, unleashed
Frisk Enterprise Search with its ‘Document Fetcher’ feature ingested close to 90TB of data, creating an index of over one billion archived emails, improving the efficiency and accuracy of the information gathering requests.
Crucial data formats and sources, captured
Frisk accurately and efficiently indexed requested unstructured data stores (email), with the platform’s flexible configuration and connectors ensuring all archived emails were searchable and accessible, all through an easy-to-use interface.
Frisk Data Consulting driving efficiencies
The Frisk team identified additional opportunities to improve the speed of indexing and delivered highly tuned extraction logic to prioritise and optimise email extraction.
The team also advised on appropriate computing resources to process all data within the program period, drastically improving speeds and delivering efficiencies back to the business.
FOI requests, fast-tracked
The data indexing speeds delivered were faster than estimated, increasing efficiencies, liberating the department, freeing up resources for more effective and value-add tasks, and ensuring Australian citizens were able to access the information requested in a timely fashion.
From the client:
“The Department for Education engaged Frisk to ingest and index a large dataset of historical unstructured data to enable search over a variety of input parameters and accurately return results in a timely fashion.
Frisk Enterprise Search has greatly improved response times to deliver accurate data to customers and an improved overall end user experience via the easy-to-use interface.”
Simon Chapman
Assistant Director, Digital Architecture and Operations
Department for Education, Government of South Australia
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