Departments and agencies in a number of large cities—including New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, Cleveland and Toronto—rely on Laserfiche software to manage information and eliminate tedious paperwork. But this month, as the International Institute of Municipal Clerks holds its annual conference in Atlanta, we spotlight two small towns that use Laserfiche to safeguard historical documents, increase staff efficiency and improve communication with citizens.

What do these towns have in common? Each is located in the northeastern United States, and each is a client of General Code, a Laserfiche reseller based in Rochester, NY. More importantly, each has a forward-thinking clerk who not only persuaded the town council to purchase Laserfiche, but who’s currently working to maximize the town’s Laserfiche investment by expanding the system to additional areas of city government.

Woodcliff Lake, NJ (Population: 5,700)

Several years ago, a descendant of one of the town’s founders lobbied the borough council to take action to preserve Woodcliff Lake’s historic documents. So, with the council’s approval, Borough Clerk Lori Sciara hired a firm to scan these documents into an electronic database, where they’d be safely stored and easily accessible to anyone who wanted to read them. But when she saw a Laserfiche demo, she realized the city could do a lot more with this database, and she promptly went back to the council to request additional funding for a Laserfiche system.

Sciara faced a definite challenge in getting elected officials to approve the purchase. “Our Laserfiche system cost $12,000, and that’s a fair amount of money for a small town,” she says. Fortunately, the council had a well-informed group of technical advisors, and councilors were really impressed when they saw Laserfiche in action. The council soon allocated funds, and the town installed Laserfiche in early 2007.

Staff now scan council meeting minutes into Laserfiche as soon as they’re recorded, and they’re slowly scanning additional documents and records into the Laserfiche repository. Working with General Code, the city migrated the contents of its historical document database into Laserfiche, and the town’s planning and zoning boards will soon use Laserfiche as well.

Sciara isn’t finished. Working with Councilman John Glaser, the leader of the town’s technical committee, Sciara has drawn up plans to make some processes completely paperless, starting with borough council meetings. She and Glaser want to entirely eliminate printed agendas and reports from these meetings; instead, staff will use Laserfiche to copy the agenda and supporting documents to CD, which councilors will then access from their laptops.

You don’t have to be a big city to go high tech, Sciara says, and she notes that the town’s Laserfiche system has been an excellent investment. “How can you be a custodian of records and not want to make this change?” she asks. “I would say that as far as municipal spending is concerned, it would be a disservice to your residents not to have this system in place.”

Bethel, CT (Population: 9,000)

Town Clerk Lisa Bergh faced an uphill battle when she asked for funds to purchase Laserfiche. Bethel’s previous document management system had caused nothing but problems. It took five minutes to scan a document and cost ten dollars to retrieve it. Technical support was so poor that the vendor eventually went out of business.

Working with General Code, Bergh put together a Laserfiche presentation and won support from the town council, known as the board of selectmen. “I covered all the bases,” Bergh says. “The board’s main concern was whether we’d have technical support when we needed it. But after working with General Code, we knew that wouldn’t be a problem.”

Staff now scan meeting minutes from each of the town’s 37 boards and committees into Laserfiche, and then post the scanned files to the town’s Website, where citizens can easily access them. The clerk’s office has also scanned most of its other documents and records into Laserfiche, and staff can now easily find any document a citizen requests, usually in a matter of seconds.

The board of selectmen was so impressed with these results that they recently expanded the system to the first selectman’s (mayor’s) office. And Bergh isn’t finished—she currently has plans to scan all the town’s property records into Laserfiche.

“I can’t promote Laserfiche enough,” she says. “It’s easy to use, it makes us more efficient and it saves us endless amounts of time.”

Posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 12:47 pm under UserNews. You can comment on this article. trackback from your own site.