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Sprint Nextel Takes Control ofTheir Records and Documents
Communications giant minimizes corporate risks and storage
costs with OpenText Records Management solution

Sprint Nextel, headquartered in Overland Park,Kansas, offers a comprehensive range of wireless andwireline communications services, bringing mobility toconsumers, businesses, and government users.

INDUSTRY
Communication

CUSTOMER
SprintWith more than 40,000 full-time employees, Sprint served nearly 56 million customers
at the end of Q3 2012 and is widely recognized for developing, engineering, anddeploying innovative technologies, including the first wireless 4G service from anational carrier in the United States, and offering industry-leading mobile data services;leading prepaid brands, including Virgin Mobile USA ®, Boost Mobile™, and Assurance
Wireless; instant national and international push-to-talk capabilities; and a global Tier 1
Internet backbone. American Customer Satisfaction Index™ rated Sprint number one
among all national carriers in customer satisfaction and most improved, across all 47
industries, during the last four years. Newsweek® ranked Sprint third in its 2012 Green
Rankings, listing it as one of the nation’s greenest companies, the highest of any
telecommunications company.

Uncontrolled documents in central repository
In 2000, Sprint implemented OpenText Content Server as their electronic document
management system. Known as “Doc-Share,” the system provides employees with acentral repository for storing and sharing electronic documents. To deal with the explosive
growth of electronic documents, Sprint added more storage, but this temporary solution
was getting more and more expensive. In addition, the system offered no means toenforce retention periods and disposition rules and no way to designate certain
documents as records.
A formal records management solution was needed to safeguard Sprint against therisk and cost of content. During eDiscovery exercises, extremely large sections of therepository would have to be collected by the legal department for analysis with no way
to narrow the scope via proper retentions and classifications of the information. Insteadof sifting through potentially thousands of documents, the legal analysts at Sprint had tosift through millions.

E N T E R P R I S E I N F O R M AT I O N M A N A G E M E N T

CHALLENGES• Uncontrolled documents• Inability to find records• Exposure to legal risk
• High storage costs that continue to multiply

SOLUTIONS• OpenText Content Server• OpenText Records Management• OpenText Classifications

BENEFITS• Improved compliance• Reduced storage costs• Controlled documents and records• Simple classification process for new content

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Scenarios such as these were driving up costs within theenterprise as well as widening the opportunity for legal problems.
Sprint needed a way to enforce retention periods and to designate
certain documents as records.

Tight integration with OpenText“In order to make this project a success, we knew we needed a tightintegration between our document management and records/
classification management tools,” says Scott Granger, Manager,
Intranet Portals and Content Management at Sprint. “As a longtime customer of OpenText, and since the records management
module was already being used successfully to maintainthe inventory of archived company records, it was a perfectmatch to utilize OpenText Records Management and OpenText
Classifications in Doc-Share. The modules were user friendly,
could be easily extended to everyone across the enterprise, andwould not require a major learning curve or major involvementfrom the IT help desk. The OpenText solutions were the only viable
way to gain control over the number of records in existence as wellas those being created on a daily basis.”

Simplifying the records classifications
A diverse team, including representatives from IT, Legal, Records
Management, Corporate Communications, and HR, was createdto take on this project. “We knew from the beginning that, although
the records management and classifications modules were going
to be implemented, they could not simply be turned on to solve
the problem. There would be a lot of work to do after the tools
were installed,” explains Granger.
First, the team organized the almost 300 records classificationsin the corporate retention schedule into “big buckets” in order

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to simplify identification of electronic records and to improveconsistency in lifecycle management. Then, they created 11records families, which were consolidations of existing records
classifications with similar retention requirements and a similar
high-level business function. The relationship of the records
classifications to the records families is documented within
the corporate retention schedule. “This step was imperativein simplifying the classification process for our end users,”
says Granger.
Record Series Identifiers (RSIs) were creat-ed within the records
management system to reflect the rules governing the lifecycleof each records family. This also allowed them the option of addingmore granular records classification as a sub-classification, if theend user wants to utilize the more specific records classification
title or the retention rules associated with the records classification.
Only four of the records families have a “flat retention” period
and use the record date in Doc-Share to calculate retention.
The remaining seven have event-based retention rules that use
the status date field. Since the fields automatically populate andupdate, the lifecycle management process is virtually transparent
to the end user.
End users from each department have their own type ofclassifications, and they’re educated on what the retention period
is for whichever classification they apply to the record. “Theyupload their document to a specific folder and don’t even realizethat they just classified that document based on that folder’sretention policy. This way, they don’t have to select one every timethey upload a document,” explains Granger. Staff are also given a
notification when the retention is about to come due in case theywant to move it or it’s a work in progress, etc.

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Recreated PMS“The user-friendly solutions
from OpenText allow therecords management process
to integrate seamlessly into theway people work today.”
SCOTT GRANGER, MANAGER, INTRANET PORTALSAND CONTENT MANAGEMENT, SPRINT“We have about 120,000 active users, but you could probablyinterview ten Sprint folks and eight or nine of them would haveno idea that they’re classifying content when they upload adocument,” says Granger. “It’s that easy.”

Department-specific project managers
When the project officially began in 2009, the Doc-Sharerepository contained well over 10 million documents, and the teamat Sprint faced a very daunting task. “How do you classify millionsof documents when the project team is no bigger than 10 people?
We knew we could not do it ourselves, so we took advantage of theuser-friendly modules and developed an end-user-based approachthat allowed folder administrators across the company to helpclassify the documents,” Granger says.
The team identified their top-level folders and designed
communication and training plans for each. Some folders
corresponded with major organizations within the company(e.g., Finance, Sales/Marketing, IT). Then the team reached out tothe directors of each impacted organization to explain the program
and request a project manager for their organization.
“When we started the program, we considered introducing
it as a mandate from the IT team. However, we soon changed
our approach, realizing that we would get much better results
if the message came from the legal team. We had the initialcommunication come from our chief legal counsel saying, ‘Hey,
we’ve got this great new process coming down the pipe. Expecta note from our IT and records management folks. They’re doing
this initiative, and this is why they’re doing it,’” explains Granger.
“Getting people to understand why we’re doing it instead of IT trying
to tell them to do it was much more effective. It carries a bit moreweight when the chief legal counsel emails you,” says Granger.

Solid teams and lots of reference materialSprint reported the biggest lesson learned when implementing therecords management system was to create solid, knowledgeable
teams at the very beginning before they attempted anyclassifications. Someone from the records management teamconducted all the training classes.
“Make sure you have the tools in a variety of formats to help end
users classify their documents consistently and accurately,” says
Abby Schmidt, Records Manager at Sprint. “This is imperative
when requiring content owners and users to classify their material.”

Some people were very familiar with the OpenText solution andhow it works, and others were not. Some people were familiar withrecords management, and others were not. So the team felt thathaving those materials and documents in place was definitely a bigfactor in managing the success of this initiative.
“Abby spent countless hours on this project and was instrumental
in making this happen,” states Granger. “We also created several
sites where users can get job aids, training links, and otherreference material.”
Granger recommends lots of communication: “I think keeping ourusers informed and explaining to them why they’re doing it was so
helpful. Maybe it was just that it was coming from our legal team,but the way they worded it and put some monetary values aroundit definitely helped carry some extra weight.”
He also recommends having patience; “Allow a lot more time thanyou’d probably think for an initiative like this because there are somany people you have to engage and so many teams you haveto work with that it is kind of slow just getting the wheels going ineach organization.”

Strong user adoption
By pointing out the legal exposure and the cost savings, the teamat Sprint felt it was an easy sell to the executives. They explainedthat it wasn’t only because they were going to save approximately$10,000 in storage costs—it was because they were going to haverisk avoidance from an eDiscovery standpoint that could potentiallysave the company millions and millions of dollars in a lawsuit.
In terms of user adoption, it was very successful. Once the users
understood why they were doing it, the adoption was very strong.

Reduction of legal exposure and storage costs
The mission of the project was to reduce legal exposure andassociated costs as well as long-term storage cost avoidance byimplementing records management and classification practices.
With the implementation now complete, Sprint has seen
tremendous results. The number of documents classified is over14 million. They have also been able to reclaim over 1TB of storage
space as people cleaned up in addition to classifying content.
The scope of this project was enterprise wide and included all
documents ever uploaded to Doc-Share as well as all new
documents. The organization has achieved its goal of 100 percent
classification rate on documents within Doc-Share.
It was estimated that the legal fees associated with eDiscovery
just within Doc-Share exceeded $1,000,000 per year. After
implementing the classifications on all documents withinDoc-Share, Sprint’s goal is to reduce those costs by 50 percent.
Sprint feels confident that these targets will be met on anannual basis.

Conclusion“As we continue to navigate through an ever-changing electronic
world filled with regulations, legislation, and other business
requirements, we are adapting to the paradigm shift from asingle records manager for a corporation to a distributed model
where the content creator is now aware, able, and required toclassify content appropriately because they truly understand thevalue. The user-friendly solutions from OpenText allow the records
management process to integrate seamlessly into the way people
work today,” concludes Granger.

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