If Gary Agira’s story were a movie, the story would include the Ugandan IT Systems Analyst navigating government bureaucracy, stubborn workers, and perhaps most dramatically, a national registry and warehouse overflowing with 34 million government documents—to bring them all into the digital world. It’d be a charmingly idiosyncratic story, but still a universal one: document management as a metaphor for progress, with Agira’s unwavering belief in the power of technology as he moves a nation and a workforce into the digital age.

But this isn’t a movie, and the real Gary Agira is the IT Systems Analyst for Uganda’s Privatization & Utility Sector Reform Project (PUSRP). The PUSRP is the department of the Ministry of Finance and Planning charged with the epic task of overhauling the way the African nation archives, stores and perhaps most profoundly of all, actually works with records to support the divestiture and reform of 42 public enterprises. It’s all part of an initiative to move Uganda’s economy forward.

On paper, the PUSRP’s mission was simple: to provide an information management infrastructure to support improved commercial and utility services through divesting and restructuring public enterprises like telecom, energy, water and transport by increasing private sector participation.

But the paper itself that needed to be archived and managed, well, that’s what Agira refers to as “the horror of the heaps.” The national registry overflowed with 10 million documents, which, owing to an inconsistent filing system, led to information silos and misplaced documents. Then there was the massive national warehouse, located 20 minutes away. “That’s 20 minutes on our roads,” Agira laughs. “These aren’t four-lane highways.” There, another 24 million documents were precariously housed, subject to water from burst pipes, exposure, and perhaps most memorably, “vermin damage.” Yes, rats were eating the paper.

Besides protecting critical information from damage, Agira faced other challenges. Documents were often leaked to the press, which brought up security concerns. And with divestiture would come the need to strengthen the regulatory framework of newly privatized enterprises, as well as financial oversight of public enterprise.

In short, there was a need for transparent records management, even if no one knew that’s what it was called yet. “There was a lack of know-how of modern document management techniques,” Agira sighs. Librarians held a monopoly on information. Representatives from the national government viewed document management as a librarian’s task and not a part of business processes. “There was a lack of collective ownership,” he says.

And many workers were intimidated by technology, fearing it would render their jobs obsolete—a concern in a nation where many workers serve as their families’ sole support. Agira recalls one records custodian specifically. “He put his hands up and pleaded with me, ‘This is all I know how to do!’”

Agira lobbied his administrators with pictures of workers searching for records in the national warehouse, protected by makeshift hazmat suits. Finally, after a few false starts, he secured funding for the much-needed system and, by 2005, the search was on. Agira carefully assembled a team, including government sceptics, as he puts it, “to experience document management as a group.

“I realized we had to have executive buy-in from the start,” he adds. “People at the top had to own this as much as we did.”

Agira and his team looked at half a dozen options and agreed on Laserfiche. “It was easier, it was faster and we got more functionality for our money,” he explains.

Agira set up a scanning room and a server, and soon newly trained clerks began scanning in the 10 million documents in the national registry. “It was in a word, revolutionary,” he recalls. “OCR technology was something we’d never seen before.”

The benefits were as obvious as they were various. Master files were created to eliminate duplication, lost documents and information silos, security could be tracked and managed using Audit Trail, and, in a country with molasses-slow internet capabilities, Web Access made remote retrieval available, which was in itself revolutionary. “FTP isn’t available to us,” Agira explains. “When we hit send, we can go do something else and come back later and it’ll still be transmitting.”

There were unexpected benefits as well: because Laserfiche stores scanned documents as single page TIFFs, document storage only used a third of the tetrabytes Agira had allotted, and Laserfiche has proved utterly reliable and stable. “In our three years, we’ve had zero breakdowns,” he says, with a mix of pride and amazement.

But it’s been the intangibles—the shift in workers’ attitudes, morale and confidence—that he’s most impressed by. Agira credits that enthusiasm to what he jokingly calls Laserfiche’s “idiot-proof” interface. “In just two hours of training, people are comfortable using the system,” he says. “They have a sense of ownership in the whole process of document management. It’s something we all share in now and take pride in. I’ve got young guys who are like our in-house experts teaching other people. Now they can be at an internet café in Singapore and look up something [via Web Access] and say ‘I did this.’” Similarly, desk officers and contractors who used to have to make day trips to the registry for building plans, blueprints or transaction files can take the documents with them on their laptops, or even just access archives via the Internet.

“I think the nicest thing has been the sense of co-ownership of the whole project from our end,” he says. “Even me, as an IT person, didn’t know exactly how accounting or procurement worked. Now, I understand why they would need copies of everything.”

With this important phase of implementation complete, Agira foresees Laserfiche branching out to other offices and departments. “We’re starting to develop how we’re going to use Workflow, but we’re still in the infant stage,” he says. “I’ve talked to the minister of ICT, Officers at the Bureau of Statistics, and, based on what we’ve achieved, they’re starting to see how Laserfiche could benefit them.”

By demystifying document management, Agira and the PUSRP have modernized more than just Uganda’s information infrastructure. “People have changed the way they work. We’re even ready to introduce the idea of ‘flex-time,’” he laughs.

“Sometimes, to change things, you really have to move mountains,” Agira adds. “Laserfiche is really a magical solution, because it made moving those mountains easy.”

Tags: disaster recovery, international

Posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 11:55 am under Customer Stories, Federal Government. You can comment on this post.