City of New Berlin, Wisconsin

The maintenance of records is essential for all cities, counties, state and federal governments. Records span over many years and include minutes from meetings, ordinances and resolutions. Frequently, historical records need to be accessed from as far back as ten or twenty years ago. Retrieving this information has been a manual and tedious process. If one needed to know “the last time we voted on…” or “the last time the Council discussed…” it would fall in the Clerk’s hands to locate the required record. With a manual filing system, the Clerk could rely on nothing but an extremely good memory to locate the correct documents. Now, software such as ISYS:desktop relieves the Clerk of to relying strictly on memory and makes the task of searching for information much more accurate, quicker and easier.

New Berlin is a medium-sized city of about 35,000 located west of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Bill Bowers, City Clerk for City of New Berlin, was spending approximately 20% of his time simply searching and locating records. With nothing but a manual system in place, Bill often had to rely on his experience and memory of past events to locate references as a starting point to locate records. “A lot of time was spent on thinking of a way to find the answers. Then more time was spent on trying to find the answer,” says Bill. He discovered a much simpler and quicker way upon installing ISYS: desktop. Bill was able to search meetings, ordinances and resolutions by keywords or keyword phrases and retrieve the exact document he was looking for in seconds. “The time I save using ISYS is extraordinary. ISYS is so easy to use, and brings such accurate results!”

ISYS:desktop searches through gigabytes of text in a less than a second. Although Bill is a single user of ISYS:desktop, the scalability of ISYS:desktop ranges from a single PC to a network supporting thousands of users. Documents, e-mails, portable document formats (PDFs), spreadsheets, databases, web pages, and many other file formats are easily retrieved using the intuitive ISYS query interface. ISYS allows users, such as Bill, to search all his information from one location, no matter which application created the information or where it’s stored. ISYS will also detect and search on all new or changed documents, allowing users to find the most current information available.

Bill references the ISYS knowledge base at least three times each day. Instead of taking hours to search for something, ISYS produces the record Bill needs in sub-second time. “Frequently, when someone calls me for information, I will locate it while they are still on the telephone,” said Bill, “You just can’t get any faster than that.”