Brian Leach has worked in IT with South Carolina’s State Election Commission (SEC) for decades, today serving as CIO and Director of Election Technology Services. One of the SEC’s primary roles is to help counties across South Carolina administer elections by sharing critical updates, training information, best practices, and a wealth of other information.
Until deploying Roundtable, SEC used an intranet-style website that was built in the early 2000s. “Age was a challenge,” Leach said. “We were constantly patching it. It worked well enough during non-election time, but during election season, when usage picked up, when election officials were sharing more resources and more information, the site struggled.”
Beyond the hours required to maintain its legacy system, SEC personnel struggled to keep its intranet clean — duplicative information was rampant. “Different people have interacted with the system over the course of 20 years or so, people used different taxonomies, and documents were tagged in different ways. Someone would search for something and find four different versions of it, meaning our staff couldn’t find things efficiently. So it was a big effort for me, I ended up sinking a lot of time into training people how to name and tag documents,” Leach said.
Privacy was another technical issue. Flexible permissions — allowing some users to see certain content and not others — was essentially non-functional. “We kept it as all-or-nothing. If we shared something, everyone had permission to see it.”
Ultimately, the challenges compounded. Leach and his small cadre of IT professionals knew building, deploying, and maintaining their own cloud-native application wasn’t feasible. The SEC needed something easy to deploy and simple to use with robust privacy and security features — and Roundtable checked the boxes.
Unlike other government technologies, which can take months or years to deploy, Roundtable can be deployed in days. For the SEC, migrating more than twenty years of documents to a new system would typically be an onerous, manual process. “Roundtable helped us implement their government operations platform and get it right, with some tooling on the backend to support data migration,” Leach said.
“Election days are busy and hard. When election officials are struggling to find the right document, or the right version of the right document, that is not helpful,” Leach said. Roundtable’s Unified Search allows users to find information or files they need — whether it’s a discussion, document, template, email attachment, spreadsheet, video, or image. Powerful filters help users narrow down resources by type, tag, keyword, and more, so they can spend less time finding what they need and more time achieving their mission. “In Roundtable, search is simple,” Leach said. “Ten out of ten times, users are taken to the right place to find the right information when they search. Roundtable has enhanced our knowledge management capabilities; it’s one of the biggest benefits."
The lack of flexible permissions in the SEC’s decades-old platform is, unfortunately, not rare. Even more modern, off-the-shelf tools struggle with permissions-based data access and usage across organizations. For the SEC to effectively work with its county partners, it needed a digital space where everyone could collaborate while being able to restrict access to certain information. “We worked with the Roundtable team to enhance the platform’s security posture, and I have to say, I’m impressed with its capabilities today.” Built on AWS GovCloud, Roundtable ensures only invited and validated users can join. Once in Roundtable, our Spaces are federated by permissioning and access, meaning it’s easy for administrators to empower everyone to collaborate and manage what information people can access and what they can’t.
“From an IT perspective, Roundtable does everything we need it to do. It’s made my life, my team’s life, a whole lot easier.”
