Halliburton establishes an email management system to meet knowledge management and compliance needs

Open Text system addresses regulatory requirements while reducing e-discovery costs.

“We went through a thorough analysis, considering several different vendors. In the end, Open Text demonstrated the ability to adapt its current technology solutions to meet our project scope in such a way that would establish a working partnership arrangement for the creation of our new system and the innovations that would arise out of that collaborative effort”
-Bonnie McClinton, Records & Information Management (RIM) Global Operations Mgr., Law Department, at Halliburton

Founded in 1919, Halliburton is one of the world's largest providers of products and services to the energy industry. With more than 50,000 employees in approximately 120 offices in 70 countries, the company serves the upstream oil and gas industry throughout the lifecycle of reservoirs-starting with exploration and development, moving through production, operations, maintenance, conversion, refining, and infrastructure and abandonment.

Business Challenge

Like many large corporations today, most business records at Halliburton are created and maintained using email. Due to different methods of email storage throughout the company many users did not make the connection between emails and official business records, and therefore may not even have been aware of what exactly qualified an email as a vital record. Although most email was saved, up to eighty percent of the email received and stored was considered to be unnecessary information because it didn't meet the standards of a business record.

Essentially this left every single email sent or received on the company system open to legal discovery, even when it was not pertinent. As a result, Halliburton was spending millions of dollars on e-discovery due to the retention of mass amounts of unnecessary employee email. This mountain of unlimited and uncontrolled email was stored on both Microsoft® Exchange servers and hard drives through Microsoft Outlook's archiving tool in Personal Store folders or .PST files.

"From a legal compliance standpoint, if you can't figure out a way to determine what the email is, you end up keeping it for a very long time and every time you get in litigation someone has the potential to ask you to produce all of that email. The general rule is: if you have it, you have to produce it," says Bonnie McClinton, Records & Information Management (RIM) Global Operations Mgr., Law Department, at Halliburton. "What we wanted to really focus on was deleting email that had no business purpose, had no record retention purpose, and was just information that people forgot that they had." 

McClinton says that employees need to understand that it is okay to delete email, but it is up to the employee to make those decisions. "It is information within their control, be it personal information, company business records, or reference material. Having employees - rather than an automated system - decide what to keep and what not to keep, is the best way to fulfill the requirement of keeping business records for their correct retention time. By trying to understand how people use email, and implementing a solution that puts those understandings into place, we believe that we will have a higher percentage of compliance than we would otherwise."

Halliburton did not have a single official repository for the retention of vital business records but rather stored them in a number of places. After moving to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 with its new email management capabilities for managed folders, the company began searching for a records management solution that would enable it to leverage this functionality.

Establishing control over electronic documents

Halliburton's Executive Team created the RIM (Records Information Management) team, led by McClinton, who would be responsible for the implementation of the new email management system. The Company hired consultants to provide experience in electronic records management and update Halliburton's record retention schedule. An internal steering committee was created-involving members from Legal, IT, Tax and Audit-to sponsor the project and provide oversight, direction, project management and approval to help the planning team achieve its business objective.

"We went through a thorough analysis, considering several different vendors. In the end, Open Text demonstrated the ability to adapt its current technology solutions to meet our project scope in such a way that would establish a working partnership arrangement for the creation of our new system and the innovations that would arise out of that collaborative effort," says McClinton.

Halliburton chose Open Text Email Management for Exchange Server 2007 and Open Text Records Management to establish control over their email records. With Exchange Server 2007, users can organize messages into customized Microsoft Office Outlook folders for individual departments, users or functions based on Halliburton's corporate policy requirements. The Open Text system would act as Halliburton's repository for electronic records, establishing retention rules and folders such as a record retention schedule.

"Our relationship with Open Text would never have occurred if it wasn't for the way in which we were approached... When we met the Open Text team, they wanted to hear what we were looking for. They loaded Office 2007, talked to us about the managed folder utility and figured out what we were trying to do. Open Text listened to what we had to say. At that point, it was pretty much a done deal," says McClinton.

Open Text's Email Management solution enhances the Exchange Server 2007 environment by enabling customers to apply their centralized records management policies through these managed folders transparently. With this application, each message automatically inherits the centralized record classification assigned to a folder when users drag and drop emails into that folder. Based on the classification, the message is assigned an appropriate retention and disposition lifecycle.

Implementation Process

A year-long "proof of concept" plan, made up of 100 employees, was used at Halliburton to work out the bugs and employee use issues prior to deployment. This allowed changes to be made prior to deployment, and allowed for a more broad-based view of the methodology.

Since all employees of Halliburton would be impacted by the deployment, the RIM team prepared a plan to help ease change management during system implementation. In-person training was provided to help employees define business records, manage files and comply with company policy and practice, and question and answer sessions based on the experience were made available to employees during the entire deployment process, with employees receiving full feedback on their concerns.

An email management system based on common sense

Halliburton's customized email solution entails the use of Microsoft's managed folders with Exchange 2007. By creating three Zones-Zone 1 for inbox, sent, junk and trash items that would be deleted after 60 days; Zone 2 for managed folders created by users that would be deleted after 2 years; and finally Zone 3, designated as business record storage, where employees can drag and drop email into an appropriate folder for the type of retention they need. Emails designated as business records are stored in the Open Text archive, where retention is based on Halliburton's corporate record retention schedule, applied using Open Text Records Management.

"With the help of the Open Text system, Halliburton created a common-sense, real approach to their email management-an email solution that can be used by any company, regardless of its specialty. The company's email management system allows people to protect and save their business records for the retention period required by law, while allowing the RIM team to follow the entire lifecycle of the business record contained in email," says McClinton. "The entire process is filtered by an auto-delete function that prevents the accumulation of unwanted email, while providing allowance for litigation related "holds management" of content contained or attached in an email. Additionally, the email repository can be actively managed for content, allowing for the immediate deletion of non-business records that mistakenly end up in the record repository."

Defining a vital business record

Halliburton's potential long-term successes with Open Text include decreased litigation expenses in e-discovery, an increase in Business Record compliance, and a considerable decrease in unnecessary email storage and the costs associated with that. However, the most significant business benefit so far is the increased knowledge of what a business record is, and how long it must be retained. The end-user now has more electronic space in which to manage the email, while providing a place to store emails that doesn't affect the space he or she needs to use in storing transitory emails.

All 50,000 employees at Halliburton will be placed on Halliburton's new email management system. It has given employees something that most of them did not have before-adequate electronic space in email. Ultimately, Halliburton's email management system allows employees to store their electronic business records in a place that is backed-up and managed, rather than on a hard drive that can crash or be stolen.

"For us, the key benefit of using Open Text is the ability to manage our email. It gave us a way in which we can leverage Microsoft Exchange's ability to create and manage folders so that people could categorize the email what they wanted to keep and what they didn't want to keep, and then feel confident that the things they wanted to keep could be put into an archive that is readily accessible to them," says McClinton. "One of the things we like about Open Text is when it archives, it leaves a link behind that actually looks like the email, and then when we want to open it, even if there are attachments, it's just a click and back comes the original email. The end user doesn't know that it isn't the original email, so that process really becomes transparent and makes it extremely easy for employees to figure out which business record they would like to put in which folder so that the proper retention periods are applied."

Taking managed folders a step further...

Because Halliburton is currently in the deployment and monitoring phase of their email management solution, it's too soon to determine metrics for success or failure. However, they do plan to take the managed folder approach a step forward-by using this same methodology in their development of taxonomies for their future SharePoint Integration, which is now in the beginning stages.