As chief probation officer for LaPorte Superior Court No. 4 in Indiana, Steve Eyrick knows a great deal about rehabilitation. Every day, he works with clients who’ve been charged with misdemeanors and Class D felonies, and it’s his job to help them turn their lives around.

Of his probationers, Eyrick says, “They’re just people who make some bad decisions. I try to focus on their issues and their individual dynamics, while at the same time testing them and making sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”
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There’s little in life that’s more personal than health care, and those of us who have faced serious illness know how important it is to receive quality care from a doctor we trust. Unfortunately, not all medical professionals consistently provide the highest level of patient care, and that’s where, in Texas, the Texas Medical Board comes into play.

As the state regulatory agency charged with protecting citizens’ health and safety, the Medical Board regulates the practice of medicine in Texas by licensure, discipline and education. It has a legislative mandate to file and track all complaints filed on any doctor licensed in the state—typically hundreds of them a year.
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There’s little in life that’s more elemental than water. And yet, in most developed countries, it’s easy to take access to safe water and sanitation for granted.

Prior to the creation of the Central Contra Costa Sanitary District (CCCSD) in 1946, however, Contra Costa County—located east of San Francisco, CA—was in crisis. A post-war building boom had brought an influx of new residents, most of them relying on septic systems that didn’t take well to the area’s heavy adobe clay soil. With septic tanks overflowing and waterborne diseases such as typhoid becoming a potential threat, health authorities considered the polluted conditions in the county to be among the worst in California.

As a result, the CCCSD was formed as a special district, a sewer system and treatment plants were put in place, and the public received much-needed access to safe water and sanitation.
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No municipality has dedicated itself to the growth of the Laserfiche community more visibly this year than Norfolk, VA. So much so that the city’s in-house Laserfiche champions have encouraged user interaction by co-founding the Hampton Roads User Group, one of an unprecedented number of user groups that have sprung up across the state in the last two years.

The way W. Alondo McClees, Laserfiche Luminary and leader of the Technology Systems Team for the Norfolk Commissioner of Revenue, explains it, he and his colleagues were just “filling a need” when he and users from three other Virginia municipalities (Fredericksburg, Hanover and Charlottesville) first initiated a statewide Laserfiche user group for their Commissioner of Revenue offices at a 2007 regional conference.
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When Wendi Smith accompanied her friend Kristy DeLong from the City of Carmel, IN, to the Laserfiche Conference in Los Angeles last January, she was supposed to be on vacation. But as the Administrative Assistant for the Town of Brownsburg’s Planning and Building Department, Smith started to get her own ideas about the kinds of cost-savings and operational efficiencies Laserfiche could bring to the modest but progressive Brownsburg, a town of just 20,000 that Money Magazine named the 33rd “Best Place to Live in America.”
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Judges are often not fond of challenging the status quo and paperwork has definitely set a precedent in America’s courthouses. But as electronic document management is moving into courthouses across the country, Laserfiche has been going Hollywood—turning trial testimony into made-for-TV high drama. Full story »

The Clay County Utility Authority is an independent special district, created by special legislation in Chapter 94-491 of the Florida statutes, that services the water, wastewater, and reclaimed water needs of its service area in Clay County, Florida. “Being a governmental entity, CCUA obtains its revenues from its ratepayers, not from taxpayers,” explains Dave Howell, Records Management Administrator. And when people don’t use as much water – say, in the case of the recent economic slowdown and the resulting lull in home building and new service requests – CCUA acts like any other business: It watches spending and looks for ways to cut costs. Howell says Laserfiche has given him the administrative control to be flexible enough to not only manage CCUA’s exponential paperwork growth, but to monitor productivity, ensure compliance and implement a disaster recovery plan. As a result of this streamlining, efficiency and oversight, CCUA has been able to not only solve its document management issues, Howell says, but has also been able to cross-train existing staff to run more efficiently.
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The West Piedmont, VA, Health District is going high-tech when it comes to digging below ground. By using Laserfiche to enable instant access to digging permits, this branch of the Virginia State Health Department has expedited the process of digging wells and septic systems for new real estate development in this scenic slice of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
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The City of Sun Prairie, WI, is the fastest growing city in Wisconsin with 26,000 residents and counting. But serving this rapidly expanding community has meant its municipal offices are spread out between its City Hall and satellite facilities that house various departments, its wastewater treatment and even a public access cable station. The main fire and EMS stations are housed in yet a third location.

So when City Clerk Diane Hermann-Brown says staying on top of Sun Prairie’s mounting paperwork was a city-wide problem, she literally means city-wide. “With all of our various departments that are off-site, it wasn’t just an issue of the time involved to retrieve the documents, but the time and resources involved in sending a clear, clean copy to the requesting party,” she says. “From the start our vision was to have a records management system where people could search, retrieve and print their own copies without every ever leaving their work station.”
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The Daviess County, IN, prosecutor’s office, located in the basement of the county courthouse, isn’t the biggest office to start with. But with files stacked from the floor to the ceiling, it was clear that the office, home to three prosecuting attorneys, desperately needed more room.

Thanks to Prosecuting Attorney G. Byron Overton, they’re getting it. Overton and his staff are working with Laserfiche reseller Nancy Mathes of Paper-Lite to scan and store files electronically in Laserfiche. “We’re not going paperless,” Overton says. “We’re going file-less.”
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Maine’s state motto is “The Way Life Should Be,” and the City of Saco’s could well be “The Way Laserfiche Should Be.” Thanks to a commitment to user education and establishing an in-house Laserfiche administrator, city employees in every department have embraced an ecological and economical paradigm shift in how the city does business and offers services.

So much so that in just three years, Saco has set a standard for e-government so high that its regional neighbors are beginning to look into it as well.

So why has Saco been so successful? For starters, when City Administrator Rick Michaud and Saco’s IT staff looked into document management three years ago, they didn’t have a problem, they had a plan.
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The Eaton County, MI’s Prosecuting Attorney’s Office has long been recognized for its visionary use of Laserfiche. What began in 2003 as a means of archiving closed cases has evolved into a department-wide embrace of technology that has eliminated file cabinets, saved significant time and an exponential amount of money. Perhaps most sustainably, Laserfiche has improved the way attorneys work. Lawyers summon case information – police reports, photographs, even video and audio archives of 911 calls – right in the courtroom from a digital briefcase. Plus, minimal staff is required to stay ahead of the continuous inflow of paper generated.

Behind this success has been the foresight and follow-through of Laserfiche Luminary Dr. Robert J. Sobie, the county’s Information Systems Director. For almost 15 years, Sobie has patiently championed the efficiency of the paperless workplace, department by department, process by process, all the way to the Prosecuting Attorney’s office and beyond.
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To be honest, the City of Albany, OR, hadn’t really been maximizing Laserfiche when its new Finance Director wanted to do away with using it altogether five years ago.

The city had installed Laserfiche in its Finance Department in 1998 as a virtual file cabinet. “Between 1999-2003 we were only scanning a few thousand documents a month and it was limited to just the Finance department,” admits Network Administrator and Laserfiche Luminary Allen Pilgrim. By 2004, Laserfiche storage totaled just ten volumes of 4.6GB each. A significant number, but apparently not significant enough for one new city administrator.
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Minnesota. It’s not called the land of ten thousand lakes for nothing. This aqueous state needs a total of 45 watershed districts to manage water quality and to regulate any land development projects near bodies of water.

In Minnesota, watershed districts are local, special-purpose units of government that work to solve and prevent water-related problems. The boundaries of each district follow those of a natural watershed and consist of land in which all water flows to one outlet, and districts are usually named after that watershed. They range in size from the Carnelian-Marine District with 43 square miles, to the Red Lake Watershed District with 5990 square miles.
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Since implementing Laserfiche in 2007, Collin County, TX, home to the Dallas/Fort Worth area’s fastest-growing northeast suburbs, has enjoyed enterprise-wide success automating and integrating its business processes. But as Records Manager Margaret Anderson points out, it’s been as a direct result of equally enterprise-wide pre-planning working with the county’s myriad departments.

The County saw its population increase nearly 50%—from nearly 500,000 in 2000 to 725,000 by 2007—straining the county’s infrastructure. As Anderson puts it, “The exponential growth rate of our county is reflected in the increased demand for essential county services.” The governing body of the county, the Commissioners Court, then issued a strategic direction to improve efficiency and customer service. “This caused us to look at an enterprise solution to managing our records with emphasis on migrating to electronic records,” she explains. “We had to reduce our paper and microfilm records volume.”
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