Cleaning Up Decades of Data Before a Records Management Overhaul

The Trinity River Authority of Texas (TRA) is a regional water district serving the City of Dallas and surrounding areas. With more than 50 years of history, TRA operates five wastewater treatment plants and manages a broad range of functions including general records, finance, legal, water records, and board of directors' documentation.

Over decades of operation, TRA accumulated a massive volume of records and unstructured content, with much of it residing in shared network drives. Their previous records management system, Perceptive Content, was lightly used, leaving the majority of content unmanaged. Today, TRA manages an estimated 4 terabytes of content spread across multiple shared drives, in addition to growing adoption of SharePoint.

TRA recognized that before moving to a modern records management platform, it needed to tackle decades of accumulated ROT (Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial data) as well as sensitive content such as Personally Identifiable Information.

Key challenges included:

• More than 50–60 years of information stored without consistent oversight.
• A legacy RM system that held only a small fraction of total records.
• Each department had different RM processes and data repositories.
• Unmanaged data had led to low data quality from duplicates, obsolete, and trivial records.
• With $30K in IT budget earmarked for cleanup by December 1, 2024, TRA needed a cost-effective, immediate solution to prepare for their new RM system.
• Not all departments plan to move into the new RM platform, so TRA needed insights into what to keep, migrate, or defensibly dispose.
• TRA also needed to create a defensible position ahead of any future audits and to set a baseline before migration.

TRA engaged Morae to explore how Morae Discover could help. Morae Discover was selected to:

• Scan shared drives and analyze 4TB of content for ROT, PII, and other high-risk or low-value data across 2,700 different data targets — starting with the lead department, then expanding.
• Identify sensitive information across departments, including finance, legal, and water operations.
• Provide actionable insights to reduce storage bloat, mitigate risk, and improve data quality ahead of system migration.
• Support compliance with TSLAC standards and strengthen TRA's long-standing reputation for responsible records stewardship.

The project began with TRA's Records team collaborating with IT, who served as key stakeholders and budget owners for the initiative.

TRA worked closely with Morae's Implementation Experts throughout the process. In addition to the standard Morae implementation phases, Records Administrator Kelly Murphy performed 1:1 interviews with data stewards across the organization to improve data culture — demonstrating strong commitment from the TRA team.

Morae leveraged the Discover Workflow Editor to build custom workflows to analyze, read, and tag specific content. TRA used Morae's ROT Recipes along with Advisory services to refine those custom workflows for specific data sources — combining flexible software with experienced advisory support.

While the long-term goal is to implement a modern RM system, Morae Discover delivered immediate value:

• Data Visibility: For the first time, TRA has a comprehensive inventory of its unstructured data environment. In some cases, over 79% of data was deleted. In the Admin Services folder alone, 53K of 67K items needed to be disposed of.
• Improved Decision-Making: Clear insights into ROT and PII allow TRA to make informed choices about retention, remediation, and migration.
• Optimized Resources: By cleaning up unnecessary data before moving into a new system, TRA can significantly reduce implementation costs and risks. Searching and finding specific items has also greatly improved post-cleanup.
• Met Budget Objectives: Leveraging their allocated IT budget in 2024, TRA achieved immediate progress toward long-term digital transformation.

TRA has also gained insights into data quality pitfalls across different data sources and has begun working with Morae to improve information architecture, organization, and workflows. These improvements will dramatically improve the implementation process for the long-term RM system.

TRA views this initiative as a critical first step toward full lifecycle information governance. With a clearer picture of its data environment, TRA is well-positioned to:

• Implement a modern RM platform in the coming year.
• Continue leveraging Morae's solutions to support compliance, governance, and secure access to information.
• Extend cleanup and discovery across additional repositories, including SharePoint.
• Completely eliminate network shared drives in favor of more streamlined, user-friendly repositories.
• Maintain a defensible position for future audits using the baseline established through this project.