With approximately 150,000 residents, Franklin County comprises 52 different departments, including the Commissioners’ Office, Human Resources, Human Services and Risk Management, to name just a few. Yonker notes that these departments “operate like 52 separate businesses under the same umbrella.”

In this kind of environment, it’s especially important to establish enterprise-wide IT standards to promote consistency and cross-departmental collaboration, Yonker says. However, it’s often difficult to find technology that’s agile enough to meet the needs of many different departments and flexible enough to adapt quickly and cost-effectively to changing conditions.

“It’s hard to convince all the different departments that they can all use the same system,” says Yonker. “Because of that, we didn’t start out thinking Laserfiche was going to be enterprise technology. But after the enterprise content management seed was planted in one department, suddenly all our departments wanted to know more.”

The Beginning

Franklin County first purchased Laserfiche back in 2001. “We had some younger Commissioners come in, and they were more familiar with technology and the benefits it could have for Franklin County than previous Commissions had been,” explains Jean Byers, deputy chief clerk in the Commissioners’ Office. “They selected Laserfiche for its instant search capabilities, as well as the fact that we could install it directly on the computers already in use.”

She continues, “We immediately realized tremendous benefits from Laserfiche. Documents that used to take days to find became available with the click of a button. It used to take hours to find specific text within meeting minutes that were hundreds of pages long, but with Laserfiche it only took seconds.”

The new technology also made it easy to share documents with colleagues, and due to a similar look and feel as Windows, Laserfiche quickly became popular with both management and staff.

The Evolution of an Enterprise Standard

As Laserfiche took root in the Commissioners’ Office, other departments began to take notice. With their focus on compliance and prudent financial management, both the Fiscal Office and the Controller’s Office deployed Laserfiche in 2004.

“Laserfiche is great for accounts payable (A/P) functions and auditing,” says Yonker. “For A/P, instant document retrieval speeds and simplifies the review and approval of invoices. And with electronically stored documents, employees can quickly and easily pull the files needed to satisfy an auditor’s request, with no need to spend hours digging through file cabinets. That’s a pretty impressive efficiency boost right there.”

Yonker notes that rolling Laserfiche out to additional departments was an easier sell than other system expansions because there was buy-in from the top right from the start.

“Whenever County purchases exceed a certain amount, they need to be approved by the Commissioners,” he explains. “Because the Commissioners were already very familiar with the value of using Laserfiche, they never hesitated to give the go-ahead when other departments wanted to get on board.”

The next departments to raise their hands and ask for Laserfiche were Human Services, which was particularly excited about Laserfiche from a disaster recovery standpoint, and Human Resources. Both departments implemented the software in 2006.

Human Resources

The first thing the HR department did after implementing Laserfiche was to start scanning personnel files into the system. It took some time to develop an appropriate folder structure that separated employees’ employment records from their confidential medical records and discipline files, and then it took about a year to get everything scanned in.

“We probably spent between 4-6 months in the planning phase, but getting those personnel files into Laserfiche properly has had an enormous payback for us,” says John Aguirre, Director of HR at Franklin County.

A few of the benefits include:

• Reduced paper consumption. “We used to photocopy 100,000s of pages of job applications a year for review by our elected officials,” says Aguirre. “We almost never make hard copies of documents anymore since our officials have access to everything they need in Laserfiche.”
• Instant search and retrieval. “The ability to locate documents quickly is great for me,” explains Aguirre. “Not a day goes by that I don’t get a request from one of our directors for material from an employee’s personnel file for various purposes. Laserfiche makes it easy for me to satisfy their requests and quickly e-mail them exactly what they need to see.”
• Higher staff productivity. “With Laserfiche, we can do more with less and accomplish more functions with the remaining staff, which is important in this economy. When one of our part-time HR reps left the County, we didn’t need to find a replacement because Laserfiche makes everybody more efficient. Retrieving documents is as easy as opening a Web page.”
• Reduced need for document storage. “Prior to implementing Laserfiche, we had a large ‘Electreiver’ file cabinet in the office that stored approximately 1,500 files and rotated them on chains. It was always breaking down and causing us headaches. Once we started digitizing our documents, we were able to get rid of that monster, along with five standing file cabinets. We now use that space for our receptionist’s desk and our Laserfiche scanner, so our office is much less cramped,” says Aguirre.
• Easier audits. “Auditors love Laserfiche because it’s so fast and easy to use. It’s also clear to them that we’re meeting compliance mandates with regards to our folder structure and the security surrounding confidential medical records, etc. In addition, my department no longer has to stop working in order to organize for the audits.”

Aguirre notes that in addition to managing personnel files in Laserfiche, his department has also added recruitment documentation and union and arbitration files to the system, which has led to quicker resolution of some grievances. In addition, HR is currently most of the way through scanning employees’ benefits files and leave of absence documents into the repository, and it has recently started on payroll documentation.

“Laserfiche is so secure in terms of access rights and privileges that we’re comfortable using it for everything we’ve got,” Aguirre says. “For example, I’m the only person in the HR Department who can view the union files, and I’m also the only one with deletion rights. I know that unauthorized staff can’t see confidential information, and I know that no one’s going to tamper with our files. The role-based security provides real peace of mind.”

Laserfiche Rolls across the Enterprise

With some technologies, organizations hit a tipping point for enterprise adoption. For Franklin County, that tipping point for Laserfiche was the implementation in HR.

“After HR deployed Laserfiche, everybody started to ask for it,” Yonker recounts. “People saw how successful the HR implementation was, and they began to talk about what the benefits for their departments could be.”

As Laserfiche was adopted by more and more departments, the types of content stored in the system grew more and more diverse:

• Emergency Services uses Laserfiche to manage notes from its 911 calls and cases.
• Franklin County Jail stores inmate records and requests in the Laserfiche repository.
• Planning, which is tasked with fostering the proper growth of communities within Franklin County, manages new development records with Laserfiche.
• Open Records, with its goal of making government transparent to County citizens, makes plans, drafts and studies stored in Laserfiche available to the public.
• Real Estate manages audit reports and past voting results using the ECM system. It is also able to respond to 13,000 queries a week in a fast and efficient manner thanks to Laserfiche’s ability to e-mail digital documents.

With 26 departments already using Laserfiche, Franklin County recently upgraded to Laserfiche Rio to bring 24 additional departments onto the system. According to Yonker, “Court Administration will be the last big department to make the transition, and we’re going to integrate Laserfiche with the state’s case management system for them.”

Although the IT Department had not initially planned to implement Laserfiche as the county-wide standard for ECM, it’s now grateful to have that consistency in place. “We got rid of a couple departments’ antiquated imaging systems in order to move them onto Laserfiche, which makes my staff more efficient because it only has to administer the one ECM system. It’s also easier from a user training perspective, since everybody’s using the same thing,” Yonker says.

According to Rochelle Waldoch, Compliance and Records Manager at Ramsey County, the need for more efficient paper-based business processes drove the county to investigate enterprise content management (ECM). “The Human Services Department had always been a paper-heavy department, but as caseloads grew, we started having difficulty with sharing paper files. In addition, client information was siloed, so employees had to collect the same data over and over again. It wasn’t an efficient process, and it needed to change.”

She notes, however, that the county wasn’t interested in deploying a departmental ECM solution. “If the Information Services Department was going to invest the time and resources in implementing ECM, the solution we chose needed to provide a standard systems architecture and methodology for managing all types of documents across the county—not just in one department.”

Needs Analysis and Selection Process

To that end, Waldoch and Toyia Arvin, EDMS Business Analyst, worked with county staff to analyze business processes and document needs in every department. This analysis included:

• Interviews with more than 500 county employees.
• Document inventories completed by each department.
• A review of each department’s network shared folder directory structures.
• An inventory of software applications used by each department.

Armed with the results of the needs analysis, Waldoch and Arvin authored the county’s RFP. “Prior to implementing Laserfiche, we were using the DocuWare system to store a variety of document types, but it didn’t have the advanced workflow or capture functionality necessary to streamline business processes enterprise-wide,” explains Waldoch.

In terms of the selection process, Arvin says, “Laserfiche was beyond impressive when we were doing our RFP. Laserfiche Rio offered a familiar, Windows-like interface for our users; included all of the components we needed to achieve ECM success across the county, including Workflow, Records Management and unlimited servers; and received excellent recommendations when we did our reference checks.”

Central Control, Departmental Flexibility

Ramsey County implemented a 2,000-user Laserfiche Rio system in the summer of 2010. It is supported centrally by a four-person team within the IS Department. To date, the team has transferred more than eight million documents stored in the old DocuWare system to Laserfiche and brought a variety of departments onboard, including:

• Administrative
  o Boards and Committees. Documents such as agendas, ordinances and proclamations are OCRed and stored in Laserfiche, streamlining search.
  o Budgeting and Accounting. Using DataNOW Affinity, Laserfiche is integrated with ASPEN (PeopleSoft) accounting software. Users can locate transactions in ASPEN and then automatically index, store and/or retrieve associated documents.
  o Human Resources. Personnel files are managed in Laserfiche. Laserfiche security restricts file access to authorized users.
• Elections. Laserfiche allows the department to save staff time and money on tasks such as making copies, redacting private information and responding to public data requests.
• Human Services. Laserfiche streamlines case management for divisions such as Child Care, Financial Assistance Services and Workforce Solutions.

Waldoch and Arvin note that the Elections and Administrative implementations have gone smoothly. “Because there was an election recount coming up, Elections employees did their homework before their initial meeting with us. They brought a lot of document samples and mapped out what kind of folder structure they wanted, which documents would need to be barcoded, what information would need to be redacted and so on,” says Arvin.

“Because of that, we were able to get them up and running in a week,” she adds. “Working with Crabtree, we’d do a build, show it to them that day, and then tweak it based on their feedback. They’d been thorough upfront with their planning, so there weren’t a lot of changes that needed to be made.”

Efficient Case Management Commences

Implementation in Human Services, which started out with a 75-user pilot project (including 28 case managers), has taken a little more time. “Elections is a small department with a limited number of document types,” explains Waldoch. “Human Services, on the other hand, is a huge department with hundreds of users and hundreds of forms—and a heavy need for Workflow.”

To determine how to configure the Client repository that Human Services uses, Arvin sat down with key Human Services employees to better understand their processes. “Subject matter experts in each of the three areas of the pilot analyzed their current folder structure by reviewing case files. Together, we analyzed the tabs contained in the paper files and came up with a nine-sided file structure that could meet the needs of all the various Human Services divisions,” she says.

“The goal of implementing Laserfiche within Human Services is to allow case workers to collect information from clients once and share it electronically throughout all program areas,” explains Waldoch. “Electronic client files decrease delays in processing benefits since case workers have, via Workflow, near-immediate knowledge of document receipt.

“In addition, supervisors have greater visibility into the workload and productivity of their employees. With Laserfiche, they’re able to run queries showing them what’s being processed and what’s still waiting in the queue.”

Also adding to the department’s increased efficiency is an integration using LincWare’s LincDoc to create a Case Creation Form for the Client repository. “LincDoc makes two calls—one to a State system (SMI) and one to a County system (CAFÉ) —to pull the information needed to create a new case in Laserfiche,” Arvin says. “Automating this process saves staff time.”

After a case is created, it goes through the following steps:

• The case receives “Appointment Pending” status in Laserfiche. When the client arrives for the appointment, CAFÉ alerts the worker to the arrival. An intake worker assigns the case to him- or herself by changing a template field, and Workflow routes the file to that person’s New Cases Queue.
• The intake worker meets with the client to collect additional information. Once the information has been captured into Laserfiche, Workflow routes the case to Case Assignment, where a clerk assigns the case to the ongoing case worker.
• Workflow sends a New Case Notification to the ongoing worker, who “acknowledges” the case by changing a template field. The case is then visible in the worker’s Active Cases queue. The worker then manages the case for ongoing benefits.
• Once a case is closed, its status is changed from “Active” to “Closed,” and the case is routed to the Records Department for long-term retention.

Arvin notes that creating workflows for Human Services wasn’t as simple as she’d first imagined. “The biggest lesson I learned is that you shouldn’t try to replicate paper processes in an electronic workflow. We built a workflow this way only to find out that a chunk of it was unnecessary, so we had to ask the Laserfiche engineers to go back and build it again.”

In terms of additional functionality, the IS team is currently in the process of enabling electronic signatures, electronic forms and barcoding, all of which will simplify working with Human Services clients.

In terms of additional Human Services divisions, the team is working to:

• Transition 340 Financial Assistance Services employees from read-only to full-client users, allowing them to expand their use of the system beyond search and retrieval.
• Integrate Laserfiche (via DataNOW Affinity) with MAXIS, the state-based case management system.
• Integrate Laserfiche with vxVista, the Mental Health Center’s electronic health system, so that users can automatically retrieve information from Laserfiche while looking at patient cases in vxVista.

“Although we have a long way to go before we’d consider Human Services a mature Laserfiche implementation, we’re definitely on the right track,” Waldoch says.

Change Management Methodology

“A lot of counties have to force content management into their departments, but we don’t have that problem here, due in large part to our extensive training program,” Arvin explains.

For the Human Services Department, the Laserfiche team involved all pilot participants in the project from early on. “The more involved people are in designing their own solutions, the more bought-in they’ll be when it comes time to use it,” she says. “We also had some strong advocates who’d previously worked in other counties that use ECM, so that was certainly a stroke in our favor.”

Once the Laserfiche pilot had been implemented, non-pilot employees started receiving information from Laserfiche on disk so that they’d become familiar with the way information was organized and presented. The team also created a lot of training documentation (available online), including videos of how to perform tasks in Laserfiche featuring the cast of The Flintstones. “Just because something is technical doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with it,” Waldoch says. “If people are laughing, they’re paying attention.”

In-person training classes are conducted by unit, so that employees see the information and steps that are relevant to them. When needed, the Laserfiche team conducts individual training sessions as well. The Laserfiche team also plans to create a county-wide Laserfiche User Group to facilitate knowledge sharing between departments in the future.

Future Plans

Although Laserfiche is currently being used by several departments to enhance internal productivity, in the future, Ramsey County wants to use Laserfiche to directly help its citizens as well. It plans to do this by making information available to its constituents via a public portal, increasing transparency, and also by giving constituents the ability to complete and submit forms online. “We’re here to serve the public,” Waldoch explains. “We want them to get as much benefit from Laserfiche as our staff does.”

In conclusion, Waldoch says, “Laserfiche is a powerful enterprise system that’s already having a great impact in a number of departments.”

“The staff was really good in sitting down and critically looking at how they do business with their documents,” Filippi says. “Because of that, they were able to come up with the identifying fields that process 95% of their documents.”

In a series of narrated screen shots, Filippi provides an overview of the process, along with some best-practice advice:

1. Avoid inputting information from the same document at the same time.
2. Use best practices and practical needs to manage metadata.
3. How the Property Transfers Division configured their template.
4. 67 database fields shared across 26 document templates.
5. “People love stamps here.”
6. Processing ‘Claims for Reassessment Exclusion’ forms.
7. Extracting data from the form.
8. Create templates first to help determine fields.
9. How tokens use fields to name documents.
10. Include the document type in its name for future associated use.
11. Can’t find something? Check the folder path.
12. Use Zone OCR to extract data from a specific area of a document.

*****

1. Avoid inputting information from the same document at the same time.

“When you first open Laserfiche Quick Fields, it tells you the recent sessions you already opened based on your log-in ID. If someone is using that session, you can’t open it—which is good because you’re avoiding the cross-scanning, as I call it,” says Filippi. “You might have people trying to input information from the same document at the same time. Some users don’t like it because they say, ‘Well, it cuts down on productivity,’ but you have to think of the bigger picture here: We want to make sure we have accurate document data in our repository. That overrides everything else, so I’m glad Laserfiche considered that in the software’s design too.”

2. Use best practices and practical needs to manage metadata.

“Metadata management is a good source of one-stop shopping for us to identify what we’re using, what we have as far as templates and fields, and where we can cross reference data and information in our document repository,” says Filippi. The Assessor Recorder’s 26 templates below were developed in-house working with department staff to determine their respective best practices and practical needs. “Everything you see is what we’ve created internally going through the processes, testing and then streamlining.”

3. How the Property Transfers Division configured its template.

“Property Transfers has decided to do ‘one-stop shopping,’ so this is their template,” explains Filippi. “All the field names on the left are common to every single document type they use. What’s really important is on the right under ‘required.’ When staff scans these documents through Quick Fields, the only field that needs to be inputted at the time of capture is the document number. Good or bad, that’s how they’ve maximized their efficiency. They’re identifying their best business processes to help them sort and go to these documents.”

4. 67 database fields shared across 26 document templates.

The Assessor Recorder’s Office uses 67 different types of fields to process and index documents—social security numbers, permit numbers, names, notice dates and so on. “Laserfiche has hundreds and hundreds of field capabilities you use to name your documents or manage your repository with,” Filippi says. “Pretty much everything in our repository that is searchable has a field and is listed here.”

5. “People love stamps here.”

In addition to fields and tags, departments use stamps electronically affixed to a document that employees have customized to their needs and preferences. “As you can see, there’s quite a few of these. I’d like to see less,” Filippi laughs, “but people love stamps here.”

6. Processing ‘Claims for Reassessment Exclusion’ forms.

‘Claim for Reassessment Exclusion’ forms are required by Proposition 58, which exempts a property from tax reassessment when it passes between parents and children. On the left, the ‘Page Processing’ list displays the ‘menu’ of adjustments and refinements that will be made to the document. This session, for instance:

• Runs optical character recognition (OCR – see slide 12 below) to capture the assessor’s parcel number.
• Rotates the document upright.
• Removes blank pages.

“You only have to do this once—when Quick Fields identifies this document type, it will process it according to that configuration,” Filippi says. “Laserfiche has given us a lot of options on how to process documents at the time of capture.”

7. Extracting data from the form.

Says Filippi of the ‘Fields’ highlighted on the right, “When the users created this document, they identified that these pieces of information—the year, the document number, the APN and so on—are all critical to identifying, processing and efficiently moving this document through their business processes.”

8. Create templates first to help determine fields.

Before determining fields, Filippi recommends, “The first step is to create a template for a particular document type,” or a ‘blueprint,’ as he calls it. “Then, from those templates, you get an idea of your fields,” he says. “The important thing is to understand the document types first, which are identified by your templates. And then, what fields you need in each of those documents to make them do what you need them to do.”

9. How tokens use fields to name documents.

The specific metadata fields in the ‘Property Transfers’ template will be used to name the document via a token, seen here in the ‘Default document name’ window ‘Fields.’ “When you see the ‘%’ sign, this is an actual script format that Laserfiche recommends to capture what you’re seeing right now. For ‘document number,’ the syntax is ‘%, bracket, field, doc number.’ Every time we run a session, we tell it, ‘capture this information in the document so our people don’t have to key it.’”

10. Include the document type in its name for future associated use.

“When you look up the document, you’ll see that it’s named according to the document number, the year and ‘Proposition 58.’ Now, the reason we do this—and this is just our business process—is to get to a point that whenever you type in a document APN, that eight-digit number will get every associated document that comes up with it, including a Prop 58. Some people say, ‘Why are you putting the name in again?’ Well, that’s why we do it,” says Filippi, adding, “Whatever fields you have, you can include up here. But this Division, in this document type-case, has decided only to put document number, year and the name.”

11. Can’t find something? Check the folder path.

When a file can’t be found, Filippi says check the ‘Properties’ column, a “one-stop shop for diagnosing problems,” as he calls it. “If you can’t find your document when you scan or capture, this ‘Properties’ tab on the right is the first place you should look. Most of the time, the folder path is wrong.”

12. Use Zone OCR to extract data from a specific area of a document.

Zone OCR is what allows ASR to pull data from a specific area of a document type, in this case the assessor’s parcel number (APN). Filippi says there was “some trial and error involved initially” with how big an area to OCR, eventually reducing the zone from the entire document to just the APN. The Department has since reduced its error rate from 20% to about 3%. “So if you know that your critical data is always going to be in one area of a given document, then I would suggest you maximize that ability,” he says. “Our clerical staff doesn’t have to key this information.”

Filippi points to this as another example of how Quick Fields is “really well thought out from a user perspective—you can tell it which pages to OCR. Again, it all depends on how you want it to work to suit your processes in-house. The critical components of the software have been really well thought out. But, you’ve got enough options to really make it your own. And that’s why it’s really been so huge for us here!”

“Technical innovation and efficiency are important to our citizens,” says Steve Barden, Systems Development Supervisor for Durham County, “and they’re a top priority for the IT Department as well.”

Over the past year and a half, one of the major strategic projects for Durham County’s IT Department has been upgrading and standardizing its enterprise content management (ECM) infrastructure. “In the past, ECM was viewed as a departmental application,” explains Barden. “We came to realize, however, that this is an inefficient and resource-intensive approach, so I stepped in as project manager to coordinate the various installations and get everyone on the same page.”

With Laserfiche already in place in four county departments, the choice of systems upon which to standardize was simple.

“We have 32 different departments across the county,” says Barden. “DSS, HR, Public Health and Legal were already using Laserfiche, so it made sense to stick with the system they were already familiar with. It was more a question of getting them all onto the same version of Laserfiche before rolling it out to additional departments like IT and Purchasing.”

Laserfiche Rio, with its unlimited servers and ability to give IT central control over the system while still allowing each department to customize it to their own unique needs, made the most sense from an enterprise standpoint. Today, Durham County has a 605-user Rio system, along with Quick Fields and Laserfiche Records Management Edition.

In the Beginning

Durham County’s first purchase of Laserfiche occurred back in 2006, when DSS decided that case management would be easier if files could be saved in an electronic, rather than a paper, format. To date, DSS has scanned and stored the following records in Laserfiche:

• Case files.
• Food & Nutrition Services.
• Child Welfare.

In addition, it’s currently about halfway through the conversion of its Medicaid records. “DSS will be moving into the county’s new Human Services Building at the end of 2012, and our goal is to be completely paperless by then,” explains Sharon Hirsch, Assistant Director of Customer Accountability for Durham County’s DSS Department. “It’ll make the move a lot easier,” she adds, “and there’s also no room in the new building for document storage, so that’s extra incentive to make sure all our records are accessible on the desktop.”

In fact, accessibility is Hirsch’s favorite thing about Laserfiche. “In the past, staff members had to request paper records from the Records Management team, and it sometimes took them a few days to deliver the requested documentation. Today, our staff has immediate, point-and-click access to the records they need. It’s a huge time saver.”

Hirsch also notes that it’s easier for supervisors to review active case files thanks to Laserfiche. “Active files used to be locked up in file cabinets by individual case workers. Laserfiche gives the supervisors greater visibility into work as it’s being done, so they’re able to correct any errors or oversights earlier in the process.”

Seeing the success DSS was having with Laserfiche, the HR, Public Health and Legal Departments soon implemented the system for themselves.

Branching Out

…into Legal

According to Nina Bullock, Administrative Assistant to the County Attorney, the Legal Department was tired of making multiple copies of documents like medical records and transcripts, which could number thousands of pages. “It was a constant strain on both material and staff resources,” she says.

The Laserfiche implementation has been particularly useful for the Legal Department in regard to document duplication and distribution. “Instead of copying and couriering documents to interested parties, we’re now able to e-mail them or send the documents on a CD.”

Additionally, the county’s lawyers no longer have to drag boxes of paper into court. Instead, they simply bring their laptops and access documents through Laserfiche. “Because staff no longer has to transport heavy files to court or move heavy boxes to retrieve closed files, the risk for injuries, particularly back injuries, has been greatly reduced,” says Bullock. “Back injuries are the most expensive costs for the Risk Management Division’s Workers’ Compensation claims. Changing the way the county works in this manner is setting a precedent that will potentially mitigate Workers’ Compensation claims by millions in the next few years.”

Other cost savings, she explains, have been substantial as well. “From fiscal 2007-2008, our expenditures on paper, toner cartridges, printer replacements and other related costs have decreased by 59% as a result of implementing Laserfiche. As our process becomes more streamlined and court systems become more technologically equipped to receive case filings electronically, we anticipate that these costs will decrease even more.

“So far,” she adds, “these savings have allowed us to avoid cutting staff for two years in a row!”

In addition, Bullock notes that use of Laserfiche has saved the Legal Department’s support staff approximately 10-15 hours per week, totaling roughly 3,500 hours a year. In particular, she appreciates that staff no longer has to spend days painstakingly stamping Bates Numbering onto each page of an evidentiary document; instead, Quick Fields does it automatically.

She explains, “With Laserfiche, our work product is better and our volume is higher, because the time we save on repetitive, manual tasks has been redirected to more substantive aspects of our jobs.”

Bullock believes that the benefits of Laserfiche—including lower costs, higher staff efficiency and increased confidentiality of client information—will continue to improve the department’s performance for years to come.

…into Public Health

For the Public Health Department, eliminating the need for document storage has driven the adoption of Laserfiche. “In February 2011, the department is moving into the county’s new Human Services Building, where there’s no space to store medical records,” explains Marcia Robinson, Local Public Health Administrator for Durham County.

“Prior to Laserfiche,” she adds, “we were storing current records in a 10’4” x 16’9” room, and we were archiving old records offsite with Iron Mountain. The process of finding, copying and filing records was both expensive and time intensive.”

Although the department has saved a significant amount of money on charts, labels, paper, document storage and toner, the real benefit has been the boost in customer service. According to Robinson, “Our medical records clerk no longer has to spend hours making copies to respond to requests from clinicians, practitioners, lawyers and other providers. She now has the option to e-mail the information directly from Laserfiche, eliminating backlogs and providing much more up-to-date files than she could when we were using paper records.”

She continues, “With Laserfiche, staff saves roughly 15 minutes per client during the registration process, reducing wait time and increasing our clinicians’ ability to serve more clients. Laserfiche also prevents many lost staff hours spent on chart preparation, along with the frustrations of searching for misfiled, misplaced and misnumbered charts.”

Overall, Robinson believes that Laserfiche is crucial to the department’s ability to respond efficiently and effectively to the needs of its clients. “In this time of budget constraints,” she says, “our investment in Laserfiche has paid great dividends.”

Overcoming the Limits of a Departmental Approach

Although these departments were all realizing great benefits from their use of Laserfiche, the lack of an enterprise approach to ECM was a problem.

Barden explains that there were two different resellers managing four separate Laserfiche deployments within Durham County. “Each department had a lot of flexibility to use the system as they saw fit,” he says, “but the IT Department didn’t have a lot of control over what was going on.”

For example, there was one repository on a drive that was never backed up, and a number of indexes that weren’t being backed up, either. In addition, Barden discovered that DSS had been scanning documents without using OCR, which made it difficult to find information contained in the repository. “When the IT Department doesn’t have central control over an organization’s ECM system, you run the risk of losing important information and other similar problems.”

Barden notes that the implementation hasn’t been without its flaws, but credits One Source Document Solutions, Durham County’s Laserfiche reseller, with being available to assist with any issues that arise.

“Although people aren’t always thrilled to let go of their paper,” he says, “in the long term we know that standardizing on Laserfiche is going to help the entire organization be more sustainable, more efficient and more available to our citizens. I had no idea what I was getting into when this project started, but it’s been gratifying to play a role in transforming the way the county does business.”

“A brownfield site is an abandoned industrial property with an environmental or safety stigma attached to it,” says John Hulewicz, environmental health supervisor in the Elkhart County health department. “Maybe people think there’s hazardous material onsite that’s leaching into the water supply, or maybe they believe that the property is a gathering place for vandals and gangs. Whether these beliefs are based in fact or fiction, brownfields decrease the county’s tax base. Our goal is to encourage revitalization and redevelopment wherever and whenever we can.”

Brownfield sites are a particular concern in Elkhart County for two reasons:

• Sandy soil, high water levels and a reliance on wells make residents especially susceptible to getting ill from consuming polluted groundwater.
• The close proximity of residential and industrial zones means that residential property values are often adversely affected by the presence of brownfield sites.

To help combat the problems associated with brownfields, Elkhart County was awarded a federal grant as part of the EPA Brownfield Assessment Grant program. One of the main objectives of the grant was to create an inventory of all 5,000 of the county’s brownfield sites, along with an easy-to-use tool for finding and managing information about them.

Such a tool—which would come to be called e-Atlas—would ultimately enable the county to better prioritize these sites for Phase I and II Site Investigations, which include visual inspections, records review and/or the analysis of soil, groundwater and/or building materials. These investigations provide potential buyers with information that can help them determine clean-up and redevelopment costs, increasing the likelihood of selling and rehabilitating the land.

Information Overload

According to Hulewicz, the county had plenty of information about the brownfield sites, but much of it was crammed into 44 file cabinet drawers. “The paperwork was available, but it was difficult to wade through,” he says.

“Managing the information and responding to requests from the public had become an increasingly time-consuming task,” he adds. “Our resources were stretched thin and work performance was suffering. Field staff was spending more time in the office than conducting inspections. To remedy the situation, we needed to create a tool that would combine GIS capabilities with enterprise content management.”

Hulewicz says he “dreamed of the day” when Elkhart County employees would be able to click on a parcel of land within the county’s ESRI ArcGIS application and gain instant access to information relevant to that site, including:

• Historical site records.
• County-wide environmental scoring.
• Groundwater protection records.
• Pollution reports.
• Elkhart County’s parcel information portal.

With such a tool, the environmental health department would be able to have a complete inventory of brownfield sites and associated records at their fingertips, enabling faster site assessments and knowledge sharing. Ultimately, the tool would help the department achieve its mission of “preventing disease, preserving the environment and improving the quality of life in Elkhart County through education, assessment, and assurance.”

e-Atlas Is Born

In order to create the e-Atlas tool, however, it was necessary to standardize the information relevant to the brownfields in the county. Elkhart turned to Symbiont, an environmental engineering firm based in Wisconsin, to collect and analyze the data, and then to map the sites to Elkhart’s ArcGIS system. The resulting database provided a table of primary reference coordinates for linking information.

Next, the e-Atlas project team needed to select a content management system that could store, index and link digital copies of relevant reports and records to specific GIS coordinates. A couple of content management solutions—including Laserfiche—were actually already in use in different county departments. In the end, the team chose Laserfiche as the information management anchor of its new assessment tool for two main reasons:

• Ease of integration. “The integration between ArcGIS and Laserfiche was quick and simple,” explains Ryan Eckdale-Dudley, GIS coordinator at Symbiont and the e-Atlas project lead. “People query sites in the GIS application, and Laserfiche WebLink provides a hyperlink to associated records and reports. It works exactly as intended.”
• Ease of use. “Laserfiche is useful and easy to use,” says Hulewicz. “You don’t need a PhD to understand it. We can train someone to retrieve documents with Laserfiche in ten minutes flat.”

The team purchased its new system from BOLT Document Management, a local Laserfiche reseller. BOLT scanned and indexed thousands of pages of county brownfield records, loaded them into Laserfiche and then assisted Symbiont with the integration of Laserfiche and ArcGIS. According to Eckdale-Dudley, BOLT delivered all of this on time and under budget.

e-Atlas Shrugs

Just as the team was putting the finishing touches on e-Atlas, Elkhart County acted on the advice of a consultant to standardize the county on a different document management system. This meant that all of the content stored and indexed in Laserfiche had to be converted to the new system before e-Atlas could go live.

The e-Atlas project was on hold for over a year before Elkhart County realized that the conversion promised by the new vendor wasn’t going to be easy, fast or cost-effective. When the county’s new IT director came on board, Hulewicz and his team asked to switch back to Laserfiche. After giving the new vendor a last chance to perform the conversion, the IT director agreed.

Within three days of the decision, BOLT had restored Laserfiche and e-Atlas was back online.

Moving Forward

The Elkhart environmental health department is extremely pleased to have e-Atlas up and running again. The tool has been essential in identifying, analyzing and managing potential and existing brownfield sites throughout the county, and it has saved the department “time, storage space and paper cuts,” Hulewicz says.

In fact, the e-Atlas project has been so successful that it received recognition outside of Elkhart County: At the U.S. EPA Brownfields 2008 Conference, the county was awarded Best New Technology Paper for its use of U.S. EPA assessment and cleanup grants.

The success of e-Atlas has also inspired a public-facing tool called What’s in My Back Yard (WIMBY). Accessible through Elkhart County’s Website, WIMBY leverages Laserfiche and ArcGIS to show brownfields and other community threats such as sexual offenders’ residences and former meth lab sites. The long-term goal of WIMBY is to provide the citizens of Elkhart County with easy access to publicly-available information on the health and quality of life factors that affect the communities in which they live.

“As a government organization, we strive for transparency,” explains Hulewicz. “Through WIMBY, Laserfiche provides our citizens with access to the information they need to make a difference in the community.”

Recognizing the Value of Agility Early On

When CIO Richard “Dick” Aldridge joined Charles County’s IT department 10 years ago he brought a career-long belief in the value of IT-driven initiatives with him. He started by transitioning his staff from procedural RPG programming to object-oriented programming, buying his staff textbooks and leading self-study courses. “I knew we could be more than a green screen county running AS400,” he says. By 2001, IT staff had written their own program for residents to pay water bills and property taxes online.

To Aldridge, it wasn’t the “how?” that mattered, but the “why?” The answer was “Agility.” “Agility is something we have done since day one with our Website,” Aldridge says. “Businesses and constituents want to see how you’re spending their tax money, so when we increase the level of service and convenience we can offer, they benefit from that agility.”

Last year, for instance, this proactive approach resulted in a 350+ mile I-Net fiber-optic network built in conjunction with a local cable TV provider. I-Net not only gives 102 county locations high-speed internet access, it saves Charles County $250,000 a year by eliminating T1 lines and centralized servers, freeing up staff and space.

Discovering the Need for Data Governance

Against this backdrop of IT-driven initiatives, Aldridge saw the county had a growing problem with its enterprise risk management strategy – or lack thereof.

In a presentation to administrators at the Maryland Association of Counties, Aldridge spelled out the problem: “The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley regulations initially served as a wake-up call for formalized document retention policies to meet compliance requirements. But regulatory demands and the number of documents produced daily continue to grow. So a solid document management process is a necessity.”

Aldridge explains: “I actually started selling the idea of a document management system early – I mean really early – back in 2003. We didn’t have to see the lawsuits to know the prospects were there.”

In the meantime, the county’s exponential population growth – from 32,000 to 150,000 in the last 20 years – increasingly made paper-based processes a problem. A series of disasters from 2002-2004, including a tornado, a fire, and hurricane, highlighted the need for a content management system. “We lost a building with a ton of paperwork that people had filed to get housing. Then the county commissioners themselves realized they could have lost their minutes, which they’re supposed to keep forever,” Aldridge says.

“Our basic discovery was that we just had a tremendous amount of paper,” he adds.

Documents were discovered in old service stations, even water towers. There were horror stories of staff members who, while searching for documents, were bitten by paper mites. While waiting for their annual audit, the Accounting Department would find its hallways clogged with boxes of invoices and AR documents. Aldridge was frustrated. “It just irritated me for all our technology, this was happening every year.”

Back in 2005, Aldridge had actually brought a content management solution before the County Commissioners (“We didn’t know about Laserfiche yet,” he says). “I knew my staff could use it, but I could not get buy in,” he says. “People just did not want to let go of their paper.” Cost was an even bigger issue, he says: when the commissioners saw the mid-six-figure price tag, they clutched their pocketbooks almost as tightly as their paper.

Getting Buy-In: The Bake-off That was No Cakewalk

With the 2007 election of new County Commissioners came the opportunity for Aldridge to re-visit its need for enterprise-wide document management. This time, Aldridge and his staff formed a likewise enterprise-wide committee from all eight county departments. “This went a long way to ensure user buy-in,” he says.

Then the real work began: comprehensive, day-long presentations by each vendor using county documents and processes to show exactly how their solution would be used. “We called it ‘the bake-off’ because we didn’t want the vendors to describe their solution, we wanted to taste it,” says Aldridge.

Virginia based reseller Unity Business Systems presented Laserfiche to unanimous approval. “Laserfiche looked like the Windows environment we’re used to using, so our committee members understood what they were seeing,” explains IT Application Manager Evelyn Jacobson.

Besides its user-friendliness, Jacobson says the county purchased Laserfiche ECM both for its cost-effectiveness but also the fact that so many other municipalities were using it – including over 40 of her fellow Digital Cities and Counties winners. “The first thing all the commissioners and administrators asked was, ‘Where else is this being used?’ And being able to point to so many other municipalities like [nearby] Fairfax County who had gone through this same process and chosen it gave the commissioners an immediate confidence in Laserfiche.”

Planning an Information Management Strategy with an Eye Towards Interoperability

Aldridge’s vision for the new system was to get rid of its immediate paper problems, but do so in a way that mitigated future compliance risk:

• The county purchased Laserfiche Records Management Edition specifically for its ability to automate back-end records retention schedules in accordance with Maryland’s state archiving policies, while still allowing users the flexibility to search and access records easily. (Easily enough, in fact, that the county’s Accounting Chief will act as Records Manager until an RM position is created.)
• The Accounting Department now uses Quick Fields to automate capture of invoices and Laserfiche Workflow to automate AP processing. “It’s all done using barcodes now so there’s no manual entry any more – they love it,” Jacobson says. “Since its implementation, we’ve received weekly requests from Accounting to add additional users to the Laserfiche system.”
• Laserfiche implementation continues in the Planning and Growth Management department, as well as HR and  the Commissioners’ office.
• The county’s plan, says Jacobson, is to integrate Laserfiche with the county’s New World Systems public administration software in such a way that a Laserfiche button will allow staff to access documents and run reports from the current applications they’re already using. “Unity Business Systems did a really good job of showing us how Laserfiche would interface with our current systems,” she explains. “That was one of the things we liked about Laserfiche. Our technical staff can integrate it with our enterprise software as well as our internally developed Web applications. It’s very open, and we won’t have to pay for consulting every time we want to do something.”

What makes this even more noteworthy is that Charles County will do this, as it has with all its other IT-driven innovations, with a staff of just 22 – about half the staff other municipalities its size employ.

For Aldridge, the potential interoperability Laserfiche offers will become even more significant as the county rolls out its Transparency Web Portal this month as part of the County Commissioners’ transparency-in-government initiative, which was originated only last August. “We’re very Web-based – we don’t want to put applications on people’s computers,” Aldridge begins, noting the entire Transparency Web Portal itself took the county only a month to implement.

“One of the things we liked about Laserfiche was it offered a tremendous capability to put a button on our Transparency Web Portal. The vision is that we’re not only able to store the record and automatically apply retention to it, but we’ll be able to point people to the Transparency Web Portal so they can see where their tax money is being spent,” Aldridge says.

“I’ll use that to get number nine,” he laughs, confident in Charles County’s ability to keep winning Digital County awards again – and again. “The Transparency Web Portal will help us win eight next year – and then when we add Laserfiche to that, that’ll be nine,” he laughs. “Then I’m going to retire.”

A Need to Improve Data Governance—and a Need for a Plan

In 2006, county departments secured budget approval for a three-year automation planning initiative to replace the county’s AS400 imaging system, which was slow and offered limited search capability. Melissa Buman, records management/administrative services supervisor for the Outagamie County MIS Department, recognized the need to manage electronic documents as intuitively as paper ones.

“The lack of an electronic records management strategy, including e-mail retention, resulted in poor data governance, with a lot of confusion and a lack of consistency throughout the departments,” she says. Add to this the increasing costs of storage and managing paper files in various departments, and it was time for a change.

With the support of County Executive Robert “Toby” Paltzer, the county chose Laserfiche ECM. County MIS staff, who support approximately 40 departments, soon realized that while Laserfiche gave them the right tools, they didn’t yet have a clear vision for how to manage such a large project on top of their existing workload.

Creating Repeatable Processes to Balance Departmental and IT Resources

In 2008, Laserfiche reseller Cities Digital helped the county develop an implementation strategy that would balance departmental and MIS staff resources to ensure success. Led by MIS Project Manager Steve Flater, staff reviewed existing procedures and worked out a multi-year implementation timeline before deploying Laserfiche in the Corporation Counsel, Health and Human Services, Brewster Village, Planning and Finance departments.

“Our strategy was to create a foundation with the first few departments, so the MIS team had repeatable processes to set up individual departments, while still maintaining a manageable IT workload as more departments came on board,” explains Cities Digital Executive Vice President Jessica Welsch.

The paperless (or “less paper”) strategy had an immediate impact county-wide:

• Aging Planning Department files, for instance, could be archived, reducing storage needs and costs.
• Staff at Brewster Village, the county-owned nursing home, used Laserfiche to keep track of internal paperwork as well as managing client case files.
• The Corporation Counsel’s office adopted a paperless incoming mail process, reducing bottlenecks, aiding in e-discovery and improving staff efficiency and productivity.
• The Purchasing Department immediately began distributing requested documents more quickly, and cut down on the amount of time it takes to perform audits. According to Buyer Nicole Schoultz, Laserfiche helped cut the audit time of the county’s procurement cards in one department from 11 hours to less than four.
• Risk Management has likewise benefitted from not just reduced storage demands, but from improved information governance. “Security and retention are big concerns because we’re dealing with a lot of workers compensation and liability claims that involve confidential medical records and legal documents,” explains Risk Administrator Brian Margan.
• “Continuity of Operations—which is our disaster recovery plan—is also something we look to Laserfiche to help with, so if anything happens, we can get back to business as soon as possible,” Murgan adds.

Laserfiche Agile ECM Improves Case Management in Health & Human Services

In the Outagamie Health & Human Services department, with 360 employees serving seven different divisions, Laserfiche has helped staff consolidate and secure patient files, which can grow to ten volumes over a lifetime of care. MIS has set up security settings that improve data governance by limiting access to confidential documents as well as those falling under the HIPAA umbrella, redacting personal information such as Social Security Numbers. “A worker in Mental Health can’t see the records of a WIC client,” explains Kathy Watters, system support supervisor, adding that staff adoption of Laserfiche has been unanimous. “The folder structure wasn’t hard to learn because it’s what they’re used to already,” she adds.

A major procedural improvement has come from integrating Laserfiche with the department’s case management system. “It used to be that when a contracted psychiatrist came in for the day, we had to have support staff wheel all the medical records on a big cart so they could see a patient’s lab results and other medical records,” Watters says. “Now, contracted staff members just click a button in the case management application to see the rest of the files, which are stored in Laserfiche.” Not only does this save staff time, it lessens the load for users and MIS staff who don’t have to train and support hundreds of users.

Making an Impact in the MIS Department

The biggest impact has been in the MIS department itself, which now uses Laserfiche to scan and manage internal billing system records, IT service requests, inventory paperwork, financial and budgeting department forms, meeting minutes, and, of course, documentation regarding the management of Laserfiche for the rest of the county. Users are able to retrieve information such as diagrams, manuals, spreadsheets, presentations or even audio recordings wherever they are. Content is never lost, and multiple staff can access and share information easily.

With the first round of deployments complete, MIS is ready to expand Laserfiche to the Airport, Highway and Coroner departments in the coming year. Plans are also underway to complete a final migration from the AS400 to Laserfiche. As MIS Director Tom Pynaker explains, “Our Website is integrated with the old imaging system and those links will need to be re-established.”

The Value of Automating Repeatable Processes

Outagamie County’s success thus far illustrates the importance of setting realistic expectations and manageable goals. “We looked at this product much like we do Microsoft Exchange/Outlook—that it’s IT-initiated and supported county-wide,” says Pynaker.

“We learned we had to promote a team of users and IT staff to create a complete plan for the use and support of Laserfiche. We also had to look at the complete life cycle of the document to have the proper procedures implemented at the user level,” he adds. “As we continue to cycle through our departments, the same basic processes will be repeated time and time again. Thankfully, Laserfiche is flexible enough to be fine-tuned based on departmental needs.”

The MIS team is now looking at how Workflow can further maximize its resources. “Some of our future projects in MIS include paperless work request processes and using Workflow for additional services such as mail services, print shop orders, records center transfers, microfilm retrievals, and online forms with automatic routing for internal time off requests,” says Buman.

After taking classes at the Empower 2010 Laserfiche Institute Conference earlier this month, Buman is confident but realistic. “We’ve come a long way, but there are still many enhancements that can be made to further automate our daily processes,” she says.

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.”

In recognition of his commitment and personal dedication to the job, Eyrick received the 2009 “Order of Augustus,” an annual statewide probation officer award named for John Augustus, the father of probation in America.

But Eyrick’s responsibility extends beyond offering assistance to individual offenders: He’s also tasked with developing and coordinating the direction of the probation department as a whole.

For Eyrick, technology plays an important role in shaping departmental strategy. Under his direction, the department recently rolled out a video conferencing system, which has improved security by keeping inmates in jail during their arraignments. The department has also benefited from the chief probation officer’s decision to implement Laserfiche content management more than seven years ago.

“Prior to implementing Laserfiche,” Eyrick says, “we were storing piles of files that had accumulated over the course of more than twenty years. Organizing everything was a problem, as was finding enough storage room. Laserfiche changed all of that.”

Specific benefits the probation department has realized since implementing Laserfiche include:

• Increased efficiency. Without leaving their desks, employees are now able to instantly locate probationary records within the superbly-organized Laserfiche content repository. Staff members are more productive because they no longer have to waste time searching for client files in cluttered filing rooms.
• Easy integration. Laserfiche provider BOLT Document Management created a useful integration with the probation department’s case management system that allows probation officers instant access to clients’ files while viewing case information in the database.
• Storage savings. Scanning old records into Laserfiche allowed the department to destroy thousands of hardcopy documents and reclaim a large storage room that had been in utter disarray. The Court Clerk, who shares the space, benefits from how neat and organized the room is today.

Eyrick’s success with Laserfiche soon attracted attention outside of his department, and it wasn’t long before Darlene Hale, IT director for the entire county, came calling.

The Tipping Point: From One Department to Many

Charged with delivering the most effective and affordable technology to all LaPorte County offices including the auditor, treasurer, probationer, surveyor, juvenile detention and more, Hale had noticed a few problems with the way content management had been rolled out county-wide. Chief among them was that, in the years before she’d taken the helm, individual departments such as Eyrick’s had been allowed to choose and deploy their own preferred IT systems. As a result, interoperability was lacking, sharing information was difficult and costs were high.

It was time to standardize.

In the course of Hale’s research, she determined that if one of the content management systems already in use could be expanded, the cost of conversion wouldn’t be quite so high. Two systems rose to the top: Laserfiche and Docuware. Ultimately, after talking to Eyrick and his department, comparing features and functionality and considering ROI, Laserfiche won out.

According to Hale, “The biggest thing that sets Laserfiche apart from other content management solutions is the sheer ease of use. The layout is simple and intuitive, so it’s easy for users to pick up, but just as important for IT professionals like me is that it’s also easy to administer. Setting up templates and user licenses, integrating it with other products and external applications: everything is just so easy.”

BOLT helped LaPorte County migrate the content stored in Docuware into Laserfiche by completing the following five steps:

• Examining the document and information structure of the old Docuware repositories.
• Obtaining samples of documents and data from every unique document set.
• Using the samples to determine the logic and structure incorporated in the repositories.
• Creating a unique conversion program for each document set.
• Importing and testing samples from each set in Laserfiche.

Once the testing was successfully completed, the conversion process began—one department at a time.

Each phase of the migration project was carefully defined and scheduled, since departments needed continuous access to stored content even while the process was underway. Employees were allowed to look up existing information in Docuware, but to prevent “orphaned” records, staff was not allowed to make any additions or changes. After the process was complete, the converted information was mounted as new volumes to the county’s Laserfiche server. BOLT then installed and configured the Laserfiche client software on department computers and trained each department’s personnel.

Users Love Laserfiche

Although LaPorte County now has centralized control over all of its content (ensuring that information from all departments can easily be shared), Laserfiche grants each department the flexibility to adapt the system to the way they work and manage their files. “Our users love Laserfiche,” Hale explains. “It just has so many more uses and capabilities than what they were using before.”

The county, too, has reaped the benefits of standardizing on Laserfiche. Overhead costs for content management have diminished, and information management throughout county offices has dramatically improved. In addition, all of the advantages that Steve Eyrick’s probation department realized as a result of implementing Laserfiche—increased staff productivity, storage savings and easy integration with mission-critical applications—have now materialized for all of the departments under Hale’s purview.

“Better system, more functionality, lower overhead costs, excellent ROI,” Hale concludes thoughtfully. “What’s not to love?”

Washington County State’s Attorney, Hagerstown, MD

When attorney Brett Wilson signed on with the Washington County State Attorney’s office, tape recorders, photos, notes and witness verbal testimony were brought to bear in the daily routine of trying cases. Film footage and a movie projector provided an occasional change of pace.

In the last few months all those prosecutorial tools have been rolled into one, which Wilson now says has transformed his job as never before in his twenty years before the bench. The prosecutor’s office has merged its Laserfiche document management system with the Washington County District Court’s Nomad public address system to put trial evidence and testimony into a whole new light.

“Sometimes it seems like the jurors are watching ‘Law and Order,’ only it’s live,” Wilson says referring to the popular television courtroom drama series. “It’s a whole new way of communicating with the court and jury.”

Instead of pulling papers out of briefcases, drawing diagrams on chalkboards, or setting up movie projection screens where, hopefully, most of the court can see them, Wilson and his colleagues just plug their laptops into the Nomad system and call up the evidence needed from court case files stored in the Laserfiche system back at the office.

Instantly, photos, illustrations, diagrams, sworn statements or signed confessions flash on monitors in front of the judge, clerk, witness box, defense table, and on two, 48-inch flat-screen TVs in front of the jury box. Telestrator technology allows attorneys or witnesses to draw on the images on the TV screens, doing for courtroom testimony what football commentator John Madden did for instant replay.

After the image is amended through the testimony provided, it’s then stored back into Laserfiche as a new version, with a hard copy printed out and entered into the court’s trial evidence file. It’s a little like Perry Mason meets Monday Night football, Wilson says, and it’s made a dramatic addition to courtroom testimony.

“We can illustrate for the jury all kinds of things from the image stored on Laserfiche,” he says. “Location of evidence, where an incident took place where the lighting was and what type of evidence was found.”

Wilson used a recent case involving a hunting accident to illustrate the Laserfiche/Nomad system. When a bullet had torn through a home in a housing development, hunters who were perched on a rocky outcropping on a neighboring farm ended up facing charges of criminal negligence.

An aerial photo of the farm stored in Laserfiche was called up from the case file and displayed on the court system of monitors and flat-screen TVs. The prosecuting attorney then illustrated on the image where the bullet was found tracing a clear path to a rocky knoll. The hunters were convicted but of lesser charges, in large part because the Laserfiche/Nomad system made clear their stray bullet may have been careless but not criminal.

“Pictures work a lot better when you can work better with them,” Wilson says. “By being able to display the image that way and mark where the hunters were and where the evidence was found, we provided concrete visuals for things that eventually helped the court make a better judge the case.

In another instance, video footage of a drug buy taken with a hidden microphone and camera by a police confidential informant proved the key in making the conviction. When the drugs and money changed hands the prosecutor was able to freeze the image and zoom in. Technology turned everyday court room testimony into a production worthy of the popular Hollywood television program CSI, Wilson says, all on 48-inch flat-screen TVs in front of the jury.

“The CSI effect is very much in effect,” he says. “And the jury’s ability to digest that information on widescreen TVs right before them can make a very big difference in the outcome of cases.”

In each case, the visuals made it much easier for the jury to make up its mind, Wilson says. Being able to call up such a range of images from Laserfiche in court makes it much easier for Wilson and his colleagues to do their jobs.

This system is the latest expansion of Washington County’s drive to go paperless. It all started two years ago with a presentation by Jeff Sauter, of the Eaton County, MI, prosecutor’s office, according to Washington County State’s Attorney Charles Strong. Since Sauter installed his Laserfiche system four years ago, he’s spoken about the many benefits of embracing paperless technologies, most centered around organizational advantages: never losing case files, less duplication of paperwork, faster access to files, remote and simultaneous access to files. Strong’s office wanted to take it a step farther and use it as a trial tool.

After Sauter’s presentation, Strong got the green light from his own IT people and the Laserfiche software was installed a year ago. Washington County has since been back-scanning archives and started using the new system in earnest just the past few months, Strong says.

Laserfiche WebLink gives attorneys open access to the database from the WiFi-enabled courthouse. Quick Fields instantly indexes scanned items as they are being stored into Laserfiche allowing Washington County to keep current with incoming documents while digging deep into the office’s massive archive, storing it all in Laserfiche. The office’s juvenile court files have been back-scanned into Laserfiche and now the Washington County staff are working on other departments.

“We still have old paper files we were forced to work with, but that number is going down daily,” Strong says. “We’re very satisfied with Laserfiche. It’s been a life saver. Instead of having all that paper flying around, we were able to centralize everything.”

While the Nomad system helps present testimony much more effectively, Laserfiche is the steward of that all important documentation, Wilson says.

“It’s the workhorse that makes sure those testimonial documents are right where they need to be when they need to be. Laserfiche is particularly helpful during sentencing and motions hearings when unexpected demands for documents such as a criminal record, are more common,” Wilson says.

“It gives you a feeling of comfort knowing that if something is in the case file and scanned into Laserfiche, it’s also right there with you in the courthouse,” he adds.

York County Court of Common Pleas, York County, PA

A short distance to the northeast in Pennsylvania, the head of the York County Information Technology Division, Al Raniero, said his office is also interested in Laserfiche’s potential in the trial setting. With the multi-faceted, multi-departmental Laserfiche system the county’s judicial agencies already have in place, York is definitely well on the way.

York County’s court system is three years into its push for paperless operations and has reached deep into the system’s various legal operations along the way. The Sheriff’s office, including their central booking office, the county jail; adult probation; children and youth services; Clerk of Courts office and divorce courts all use Laserfiche document management in various capacities.

Where the system is breaking new ground is using Laserfiche in real-time for court testimony in what’s called the county’s Divorce Masters Office. These officials are appointed arbiters in disputed divorce cases. Before the matter goes to court the Masters review the arguments from both sides in an effort to plot a course for the case in court. What happens in court can deviate from the sworn depositions submitted beforehand. When it does, the Divorce Master calls up the sworn statements stored in Laserfiche in real-time to see where testimony may have strayed from earlier statements.

However, when it comes to testimony in criminal cases, that documentation must still be displayed through conventional means on an audio-visual cart burdened with overhead projectors, tape players and Microsoft PowerPoint presentations downloaded onto laptops. All for display on a single large-screen TV for the entire court to view.

York County’s Laserfiche repository has plenty of photos and even streaming video that could all play a useful evidentiary role in court proceedings, but now must be retrieved from Laserfiche and converted into more traditional media for display on the AV cart. As more and more documents, film or photos are being stored in Laserfiche, improving the availability of that documentation in the trial setting seems as useful as it is inevitable, Raniero said.

“We could take it to that next step, that would be something that I would definitely like to discuss with the court,” he said. “That’s very doable for us as well.”

One stumbling block is how the system might be accepted by outside attorneys, Raniero said. Attorneys with varying technical skills come into the courthouse, and bringing them all up to speed quickly on such a novel system could be a challenge. The county is working hard in that department, expanding Laserfiche throughout the entire county court system.

The reluctance by some judges and court staff in York to embrace the technology early on has yielded to a wholehearted endorsement of its continued expansion—which has resulted in some 15 million court documents being stored in Laserfiche.

A computer terminal in the court clerk’s office now provides access to those files to members of the public. York is also working on a project to provide remote, password-secure access to the court case database through Laserfiche WebLink for private attorneys practicing in the York area.

“By the end of June we hope to have 15 million documents available to 400 attorneys practicing in the area,” said York Senior Project Administrator Mary Jane McCluskey. “Our court administrators are committed to the imaging project.”

So committed that Raniero wants to go farther still. Plans are in motion to install computer terminals in York’s 19 district courts, so judges there have direct, real-time access to Laserfiche throughout the county.

Such instant access has already greatly streamlined York County’s ability to take other judicial matters out of the courtroom. Video cameras, monitors and electronic signature pads posted in the judge’s chambers and the county Sheriff’s central booking facility have taken arraignments out of the courtroom almost entirely.

With Laserfiche WebLink, arrest histories and outstanding warrants are available to the judge in real-time in his chambers so there is no hand copying and delivering of those documents for each arraignment. The judge also appears on a monitor in central booking’s processing room for a video arraignment of the prisoner, who no longer has to be transported to the court for live arraignment.

Someday, judges will have immediate access to documents stored in the county’s Children and Youth Services department’s Laserfiche database when they are hearing dependency cases.

Raniero is setting his sights on new horizons as old ambitions are achieved in York’s roll-out of Laserfiche throughout more county agencies. Seed money from Congress and continued funding from property deed filing fees provided by York’s Records Improvement Fund have moved the three-year project along. Now, Raniero says he’s wondering if federal stimulus money might also be applied to new projects.

One idea Raniero is considering is a tracking system for paper-based case files. Right now, Laserfiche Audit Trail tracks access to confidential court files stored in electronic format, even as that access is opened up in the next few weeks to hundreds of attorneys who practice in the county’s court system.

However, paper files are still required from time to time and tracking them can be trickier. So, Raniero is proposing placing tiny microchips within the paper file folders. That way, court officers can know when files have been removed from county offices and where they’ve gone.

That technology, and the expanded use of Laserfiche documents in real-time trial settings are still a little way down the road. Raniero said. As new technologies are adopted and implemented new applications continually surface that promise new efficiencies. York County’s courts are proceeding judiciously and with deliberation, Raniero said.

“My approach is to do everything in phases,” Raniero said. “We need to walk before we run.”

Shortly after deployment in early 2004, staff began scanning job files and the benefit was as obvious as it was immediate. “Retrieval. No question at all. My number one benefit is retrieval,” Howell says. “We had an employee at this end of the building, that whenever they needed an invoice, had to go to the other end, go into a banker’s box, then make a copy, then put everything back up. To find an invoice start to finish, took 20 minutes. Now, it takes five minutes, tops.”

In the process of deploying Laserfiche, Howell says, CCUA has developed “folders within folders” to sort and group the myriad financial documents and as-built drawings for each file, assigning a team of two people to scan and review, with a third staffer assigned spot-checking newly-created files for quality control. While the Engineering Department has been scanning job files since the beginning, both the Finance and Billing Departments now also employ scanning personnel. Says Howell, “Not only are they scanning customer payment information, but also ‘turn-on/turn-off’ requests, change of addresses – we scan all those requests. It just makes for better, more complete customer service having a record like that.”

These days 139 office and outside personnel access documents in Laserfiche, while 25-30 staff use it on a daily basis to either scan in CCUA documents or use Laserfiche for efficient retrieval of documents without leaving their workspaces. Ongoing backlog conversion efforts are continuing each day– thanks in no small part to a growing need for a disaster recovery plan in CCUA’s hurricane-prone part of the country, as well as Florida’s “Sunshine” Law, which mandates public access to records.

“Beginning in 2008, CCUA made it a priority to go back to [files from] 2005,” Howell says, adding that staff have made files from 2006-on their priority for this year. “We’re in Florida, so we’re looking at crisis management and disaster recovery if there’s a natural disaster. CCUA’s main concern is that we want current project files protected – that’s what keeps us operational,” he adds. “It’s not the files from 10-15 years ago, but the ones from the past two years that are very important.” Another benefit, Howell says, is that financial audits that used to mean hours and sometimes days of digging out records can now be done in an afternoon. “Instead of staff going to the filing cabinets to retrieve files, our auditors’ can go directly into Laserfiche to access and retrieve the required documents – they love it.”

Howell has long been a fan of using Laserfiche administrative tools to monitor productivity and manage long-term projects. Since implementing Audit Trail in 2006, Howell says he’s been able to maximize productivity. “I can make Excel spreadsheets and graphs from Laserfiche reports and see how we’re progressing on any of CCUA’s scanning projects.” This kind of oversight and responsiveness has made CCUA agile in a way not usually associated with a governmental entity. For instance, even in the midst of the recent economic slowdown, CCUA has not had to lay off any of its 139 staff members. Rather, using powerful reporting tools – Laserfiche among them – administrators have been able to minimize bottlenecks and re-assign staff where needed to ensure sustainable productivity evenly throughout the organization. As CCUA knows well, business is best when staff and information can flow as efficiently as the water service it provides.

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.”

Daviess County’s move to paperless file management began when Overton attended the National District Attorneys Association (NDAA) annual conference, where he heard Laserfiche Luminary Jeff Sauter speak about his paperless prosecutor’s office in Eaton County, MI. Sauter, a well-known speaker at industry events, is known to host on-site visits from other prosecutors interested in his Laserfiche paperless file management system.

“I talk about Laserfiche whenever I can,” Sauter says. “When I present at continuing education events, I show screenshots of our Laserfiche repository and explain our various work processes. I also like to show photos of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ in our office. Instead of six file cabinets, we now only need a single drawer – and it doesn’t even hold paper! We use it to hold evidence CDs. The fact that we haven’t lost a single file in over three years is earth-shattering to other prosecutors.”

At the event Overton attended, Sauter asked attendees to guess how much time prosecutors’ staff spent working with case files. According to Overton, he and other attendees guessed 25 to 30 percent of their workdays. Sauter replied if they actually asked staff, they’d find it was likely closer to 50 percent.

Once Overton thought about it, he realized Sauter was right. “When we need older files, our administrative assistants have to physically retrieve them,” Overton says. “Somebody has to trek down there, find the file, get the file out and bring it back down here. It takes a lot of time, and it happens weekly.”

After Sauter’s presentation, Overton chose a Laserfiche Avante system for the prosecutor’s office. Although he knew it would take time to get up and running, he had confidence the payoff would be worth it. “We’re just running out of room,” he says. “Laserfiche is going to save us time, and eventually, save us money.”

Staff agree. “There’s no more looking for files,” says Chief Deputy Prosecutor Dan Murrie. “Everyone can work on the same file at the same time.”

The prosecutor’s office has six administrative assistants, each of whom has a Fujitsu fi-6130 scanner at their desk and scan documents into Laserfiche as they arrive. Mathes also worked with staff to create an electronic work process in Laserfiche that mirrors what they were used to doing with paper case files. The child-support side of the prosecutor’s office, with one attorney and four administrative assistants, is following the same process as the criminal side, as is civil cases.

When a case file arrives, staff create a standard document in Microsoft Word that lists necessary information such as the defendant’s name, case number and any other pertinent information. Using Laserfiche’s “Send To” feature, the Word document is sent to Laserfiche and a case file in Laserfiche is dynamically created. The case number and defendant’s information is automatically filled in the file’s template fields, and the template is attached to the original Word document. Staff then open the folder in Laserfiche and scan and enter all case documentation by document type, where a drop down list of document types speeds data entry. And at the end of the day, all scanned documents are full-text indexed for instant search and retrieval.

This system is just as easy for attorneys to navigate as it is for support staff. Attorneys are able to open the Word document and update their notes, just like they used to write on the front of a file folder—except instead of searching around the office for a file folder, they access documents right from their desktop computers. When they’re done entering notes, they simply close the Word document and their changes are automatically added to the case file stored in Laserfiche.

To guarantee disaster recovery, files are backed up twice at the courthouse and a third time off-site. “Even in the highly unlikely event all three back-ups fail, our files are largely made up of other agencies’ files, so we could reconstruct them if we needed to,” Overton says. And the original documents needed for trial exhibits—such as blood alcohol test results, documents from other counties and states and other supporting evidence—fit in one filing cabinet.

“It’s definitely a work in progress, but it’s one of those things where you have to realize that the problem didn’t occur overnight, and the solution won’t either,” says Mathes. “Byron and his staff have been great, hanging in there and sticking with it, knowing that the end result will be worth the effort.

“You can’t pick a perfect time to get started, you just have to get started,” she adds. “There’s no perfect conditions. With this office, they were just out of room, and that’s why they had to get started. But they have confidence that it will ultimately be successful, and it will pay off in greater efficiency.”

While the prosecutor’s office is still in the midst of deploying their Laserfiche solution, they still haven’t neglected to plan for the future. Overton says the attorneys in his office will eventually get laptops with “access to all files all the time.” And once the office is ready to implement the integrated business process management functionality that is included with the Avante system, Mathes will write a workflow rule that enables attorneys to automatically send necessary filing instructions and/or case files to support staff for additional processing. “We designed the template to enable Workflow automation in the future,” she says. “We were able to sit down, plan our implementation and do what we needed up front to make things easier as we move ahead.”

Once the office finishes scanning this year’s files, they plan to start on older files in storage, a process that will likely be handled by interns. “It’s a never-ending process,” Overton says. “We need more room. The courthouse has limited space. Everybody needs more room.”

And while Overton knows his office’s Laserfiche deployment is still unfolding, he has faith in its eventual outcome. “The conversion phase is in process,” he says. “It’s a difficult process, but it will ultimately prove to be worthwhile.”

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.

“Laserfiche came into the county in 1995 as a single-user application to support my IT department,” Sobie recalls. Other departments were hesitant to see the value of scanning, but by 1997 Sobie was able to implement document imaging in the Construction Code Department to establish a digital archive of scanned building permits. By 2000, Sobie found what he needed: an internal Laserfiche champion in Prosecuting Attorney Jeffrey Sauter.

Sauter had a history of advocating increased communications between his office and the courts, and Sobie saw where Laserfiche could do just that. Sobie had already stepped up his own use of Laserfiche by having his administrative assistant scan all incoming mail for him to view online. The viability of this approach to working with documents led to a conversation with Sauter about going digital. “I saw it as more than a way to archive closed case files,” Sobie says. “I thought we could use it for active case files and sharing documents both inter- and intra-agency.”

Establishing a Laserfiche Expert

Sauter was interested – so much so that he wanted to get several scanners, presumably for several employees. But where Sauter had a use for Laserfiche, Sobie had a vision: “I advocated against multiple scanners on the grounds that we could develop an ‘expert’ within his office who would fully learn and understand how Laserfiche could benefit the office, today, and into the future.” Additionally, Sobie recognized that over time, less paper would be produced or submitted to Sauter’s office, thus reducing the need for scanning equipment. Sobie diplomatically met with concerned staffers to assure them this would be the most effective – and sustainable – route to go. “Eventually, Jeff agreed and we implemented a single scanner and began developing the expertise of an administrative staff member, Kimberly Gleason, who presently works in the PA’s office.”

In subsequent meetings with Sauter’s staff, the idea came up to view documents live in the courtrooms, which brought with it a need for wireless network access and laptops.

Sobie extended Laserfiche in the PA’s Office and brought it on-line with five laptops with wireless connections for about $24,000 – but has gotten quite an ROI in return.

“The $24,000 we spent to bring the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office on-line represents the costs to expand the system into the office. Earlier costs were not spread between any offices – just assigned to my IT department. However, the ROI with or without spreading these other costs has been significant,” Sobie says.

• Nine lateral filing cabinets of paper were reduced to one, which holds archived evidence on CDs.
• Office supply costs were cut by 34% - an annual savings of over $35,000.
• The office eliminated a part-time legal assistant position, saving $10,000 annually.
• The office also eliminated a budget request for an additional legal secretary, a savings of $50,000 annually.

The total savings? Over $95,000 annually in staffing and supply costs.

Archiving cases was one thing; relying on laptops for both preparation and court appearances was another. “Jeff experienced some resistance but he methodically promoted this new approach. On occasion, Sobie recalls, Sauter used the phrase, “There will be no old dogs here,” meaning, “Change your attitude and practices or move on.”

“Not everyone learns the same or at the same pace,” Sobie says. “This continues to be a challenge, but it’s unrelated to the easy-to-use Laserfiche interface.”

Working with the Lansing-based Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan (PAAM), Sobie helped Sauter create a system to link cases with PAAM’s online case-tracking systems. Attorney’s progress notes would be saved in the case-tracking system; legal assistants would scan and save any new documents in Laserfiche while linked to the case-tracking record and easily accessed through a keystroke.

After years of success, the more complicated a case becomes, the more Laserfiche makes sense to find, review and distribute documents. One of the early problems encountered after building out the wireless network was a weak connection causing attorneys to temporarily disconnect from the network while working in the court’s law library. The cause, ironically enough: the density of the paper-based books and documents stored in the room.

Sauter has seen many benefits since transforming how case files are established and maintained in his office. One noteworthy benefit is that discovery is now sent so swiftly, using Laserfiche and e-mail, defense attorneys often receive it before they get the actual notice of appointment from the court. In fact, Sauter has seen so many benefits from Laserfiche that he spends time speaking at industry conferences about paperless file management – and even hosts site visits from other prosecutors interested in eliminating their paper case files.

Next, Sobie plans to implement Laserfiche Records Management Edition, and possibly Workflow, to automate, manage and move documents through the County while establishing document retention policies. He’s also working to establish Laserfiche redundancy. “I believe mirroring the Laserfiche environment will significantly improve the process of recovering a document (or folder) that was inadvertently deleted,” he says. “Of course, the new Recycle Bin feature [of Laserfiche 8] helps to mitigate this problem but I also want maximum availability of documents stored in Laserfiche.”

Sobie loves the efficiency Laserfiche brings Eaton County, but when asked his three favorite things about Laserfiche, he doesn’t hesitate in answering.

“First, document and information sharing in a campus-style environment,” he says. “Second, the stability of the core Laserfiche application. And finally, the continuous product development.”

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.”

The county published its RFP in December 2006, and soon after a committee drawn from several county offices (District Clerk, County Clerk, Auditor, Sheriff, Tax Office, Juvenile Probation, Adult Probation, Purchasing, IT and Records) determined that Laserfiche (as bid by reseller MCCi) was the best fit for Collin County.

Anderson notes that she had had county-wide support from the start. “The success of the project is directly attributable to getting these larger user departments involved in both identifying the requirements for the RFP and making the selection,” she says.

Anderson had visited the Laserfiche booth at past ARMA conferences (an active ARMA member, she was a presenter at last year’s conference and is scheduled to present again at this year’s conference, October 15-18 in Orlando, FL). Anderson looked to Laserfiche for three things: its scalability and extensibility; the Laserfiche Toolkit, for integrating Laserfiche with existing and planned software applications; and the Records Management Edition (RME), in order to manage retention for electronic documents.

“RME provides a standard methodology for administering the state mandated retention requirements for all records as well as providing an audit trail for disposition,” Anderson says. “And all of this occurs in the background, so it’s transparent to the user.”

Collin County installed Laserfiche in mid-2007, followed by its first production implementation that November, starting with 100 user licenses and 500 WebLink retrieval licenses just to accommodate cross-departmental use.

The first offices to deploy were the District Clerk, County Clerk (which handles vital records, land recording, and county court at law records), District Attorney, Auditor and Records Department. Because the county was migrating from a legacy system dating from the ‘80s, a massive backlog conversion to Laserfiche was first priority. “Records was actually already scanning for the DA and Auditor, so we switched this to Laserfiche first,” Anderson says.

In the District Clerk’s office, a massive backlog conversion of documents from 1846-2000 into two million images added to the county’s Laserfiche system. “While we eliminated some paper files, we did keep the 1800s paper files for their historical value,” Anderson notes.

When it came to the auditor’s office, the County focused on integration to optimize business processes. “We added a property tax receipts interface with our RT Lawrence receipt processing system,” explains Anderson. Because the tax assessor/collector relied on paper documents, the 10 days it took to process mail resulted in over $1 million lost each day in interest. The county was able to get the assessor’s office up and running by the end of the year to coincide with the heaviest period of property tax receipts.

“Now we process payments much more quickly—up to 10 days faster,” Anderson says. “In fact, we eliminated almost 400 records storage boxes just with this one Laserfiche implementation.”

The County Clerk’s Office also uses RME as the back end for the court’s case management system, where it provides records retention for closed and inactive case files.

Finally, the Justice of the Peace, which manages traffic, truancy, small claims and evictions records, came onboard in June 2008.

With an implementation this extensive, there were understandably some hiccups along the way. “One of the mistakes we made was only purchasing one license each for Quick Fields, Zone OCR and Real-Time Lookup,” Anderson says. But with the approval of the FY2009 budget, the County will be adding Workflow, to be installed when the county upgrades to Laserfiche 8 by the end of the year, as well as additional licenses for ScanConnect, Quick Fields, Zone OCR, and Real-Time Lookup.

The biggest hurdle, however, hasn’t been what modules to use. “I’d say one of our biggest initial challenges was helping departments understand their business processes so we could develop a records series plan tied to record management and retention,” Anderson says. “It’s really an educational process.” Anderson and her team of what she calls “Customer Department Advocates“ employ business plan questionnaires, user guides and demos of successful intra-county implementations, and even help departments choose the right scanners.

These Advocates identify training needs, review business processes, records series structure and templates, and scan sample boxes of files into Laserfiche so departmental staff can see how their records series and template structures will work in the new environment.

As more departments successfully use Laserfiche, even more want to get on board. The Commissioners Court has a planned deployment through September 2009, which includes implementations in IT, the Auditor’s Department, Development Services (permitting and animal control), Human Resources, Sheriff’s Office records, Tax, Motor Vehicle and Purchasing.

“We based our 2009 deployment plan on several factors, including percentage of permanent records maintained for the department, volume of records, distributed accessibility requirements, and overall reduction in paper storage space in the new administration building for the departments moving their this year,” Anderson explains.

The County’s still quantifying ROI from using Laserfiche, but Anderson can point to a windfall of newfound efficiency.

“By using Laserfiche and changing the internal process to take advantage of the system’s new capabilities, the Auditor’s accounts payable office has already identified 300 hours of staff time saved, and reduction in volume of file folders and labels formerly used to place each paper copy of a check and the backup into a separate folder on their departmental shelving,” Anderson says. “The internal audit staff is able to review case files and receipts as part of their auditing process —freeing Auditor-, departmental-, and records staff from pulling paper files for auditors to review.”

Then there’s the peace of mind knowing that Collin County’s doing its part to provide better and more sustainable customer service now and in the future.

“We’re finally getting a handle on our electronic records, even though it’s going to take three to five years to fully implement,” Anderson says. “And we’ve definitely enjoyed faster response time when a customer or citizen requests a file. Even better, multiple users can access the same record from different locations simultaneously.”

Speaking of simultaneous, Anderson says that her biggest obstacle is handling the requests from remaining departments to implement Laserfiche. “The hardest thing I have to do is tell someone, ‘Not yet –can I work with you to make sure your needs are included in next year’s budget?’”

But as Collin County is proving department by department, the results are worth the wait—and the planning time.

Business Processes In this Case Study:

• Accounts payable
• Automated life cycle management
• Back-end records retention
• Backlog conversion
• Business continuity
• Case management
• Internal auditing
• Microfilm conversion
• Property tax processing
• Transparent records management
• Web retrieval

The dry-witted comedian Steven Wright once joked, “I’m so far ahead of my time, nobody’s there yet.” Mohave County Records Manager Chuck Chlarson can relate. He saw his two predecessors try without much success to implement an enterprise-wide records management system—despite a state mandate to do so—because of a lack of technical support and user buy-in. But as Chlarson has found, in Mohave County, being the third Records Manager is the ticket to success.

In 1998, the State of Arizona had the forward-thinking idea to get all its counties on the same page with digital records management by creating the position of Records Manager. The first holder of this title in Mohave County was Steve Beller from the County Recorder’s office, who began the search for scanning software to contend with the mountain of paper the county had generated throughout the years.

Chuck Chlarson has served as Mohave County Records Manager since January 2005.

Beller chose Laserfiche for its flexibility and expandability, instead of the standard system the state had mandated for use in all the state’s courts. “Steve saw in Laserfiche all that he thought we needed or could grow into,” Chlarson recalls. “It was a case of ‘buy what you need now and expand when the need arises.’”

But though Beller had succeeded in finding Laserfiche, he hadn’t yet found a reseller that could offer the technical guidance to help the county follow through on its potential. It wasn’t until Beller’s successor Gordon Buchanan became Records Manager that Mohave County began its vital relationship with Laserfiche reseller DocUnited. Under the mentorship of “the girls from DocUnited,” as Chlarson affectionately terms co-owners Marta Hortel and Susan Mosby, the software was installed and plans for county-wide implementation were laid out.

Buchanan visited all the departments of the County to inform them of the install and of the need to begin scanning their permanent documents into the Laserfiche system. But the rest of the county wasn’t as ready to shift their paper filing paradigm to the scanner just yet, and Buchanan ran into resistance in virtually every department. “Gordon approached the departments with a new concept,” Chlarson says. “And at that point, it was just too new.”

By the time Buchanan retired in 2005 and Chlarson became Records Manager, Mohave County had just four scanning stations and seven viewing licenses.

Building from this small but vital start, Chlarson eventually succeeded in bringing Laserfiche to all the county’s departments (except its courts, which were still bound by state law to use its legacy system). “As the third person in the position, I had the value of learning from previous experiences—both good and bad,” he says. “It was a good jumping off point for me to get started dealing with the departments of the County. I was able to demonstrate scanning and how easy retrieval was with Laserfiche’s search functionality. Also, my boss, the Recorder, agreed to fund additional scanning stations and licenses, so we could start expanding our system.

“One of the advantages we found early in our relationship with Laserfiche and DocUnited was the ability to expand our system as needed,” Chlarson continues. “When new departments came on board, it was so simple to add additional scanning stations and more user licenses.”

Again, Chlarson points out how effective the support of “the girls from DocUnited” has been to the county’s success. “Marta and Susan were instrumental in the training and education program that we implemented after we added more users to our system. Their unwavering dedication and desire to drive the 200-plus miles up to Kingman [from Phoenix] was great. Frankly, we probably wouldn’t have gotten as far as we have without them. They are everything a reseller is supposed to be!”

He also found that getting departments to actually buy in to the software itself by getting them fiscally invested in its upkeep ended up encouraging user buy in. “Two years ago, I required each Department pick up their fair share of the maintenance fees, which brought them more into the Laserfiche family,” Chlarson says. “Typically, the county’s budget process is well in advance of the fiscal year, and budgeting new items needs to be addressed very early in that process. Initially, we weren’t knowledgeable enough about this. Our boss, the Recorder, had been paying all the bills for Laserfiche, even as we added new scanners and users. In 2006, I finally got each department to pay their fair share of the bill, and now each is billed separately.”

The inter-departmental ownership encouraged broader use, and, of course, with more use comes more efficiency. Chlarson points to successful automations like the county HR department’s newly-termed records as well as the Medical Examiner’s shift to electronic recordkeeping. It wasn’t until last month’s elections, however, that the benefits of using Laserfiche became apparent. “Our real success was to scan and index all the 5”x8” paper voter registration forms so the Voter Registration Division could verify signatures from their desks rather than going to a storage room and pawing through years of forms hoping to get lucky. And with this last election period, it saved a tremendous amount of time for them.” He hesitates to limit discussion of the benefits realized to the bottom line on a balance sheet. “How do you put a dollar value on convenience? The time the Voter Registration folks saved in not having to finger through thousands of paper cards to just doing a name search on Laserfiche was immeasurable.”

Fueled by Mohave County’s steady but palpable success, Chlarson has become active in the Laserfiche Luminaries program, singing the praises of enterprise-wide electronic records management whenever he can, including at this year’s ARMA conference in Las Vegas.

“I’ve had the opportunity to testify to other counties and organizations about our experience with Laserfiche, and just how completely satisfied we were with the products,” he says. “As I talk with folks interested in scanning, the one thing most people see is the initial expense. I explain to them that all software has a pretty good price tag, but to look at what follow-up can they expect, and upgrades as they are fielded. I also stress the annual maintenance fees and what they include, at least for us.”

In the near future, Mohave County is planning an upgrade to Laserfiche 8.1. “Obviously, Records Management Edition (RME) will allow me to fix retention metadata directly to documents as they are scanned, and have schedules implanted to aid in the destruction of old material,” he offers. “We should be in great shape.”

But Chlarson is definitely looking forward to sharing his county’s success story in a presentation at the Laserfiche Institute Conference, taking place January 12-14 in Los Angeles, CA. “As you can tell, we are certainly pleased with Laserfiche, and not shy about telling people,” he laughs.

According to Records Manager Margaret Anderson, staff in the county’s courts had difficulty finding information, due to disparate systems implemented by each department. “We also had over 15,000 reels of microfilm and 18,450 boxes of paper stored throughout the county,” she says. “Files were everywhere and we couldn’t keep up with the demand. We had to ensure that staff did not unintentionally destroy records that needed to be retained, and we wanted to implement a case management system (CMS). But we also had to manage all the paper.

“Our first step was to select and implement a new case management system for the county court system,” Anderson continues. “The records management system (RMS) we chose needed to interface with this system and provide records management control for closed and disposed case files, as well as support documents.”

Anderson found the ideal solution in Laserfiche Records Management Edition (RME), which centralizes scanned paper and electronic records while automating records retention and destruction. “What I like about Laserfiche is that I can manage electronic documents, paper, microfilm and audio and video files enterprise-wide,” Anderson says.

Collin County’s journey to provide order to their paper-based legal system began with a two-year project in the district court clerk’s office, converting paper case files from 1846-2000 into archival images—a total of over ten million images.

Anderson then expanded the plan to manage archiving, retention and management of case files for the county court, integrating RME with the county’s CMS. RME provides back-end records retention for closed and inactive case files. “It’s very easy to use, and it helps us meet our goal of providing quality, cost-effective public service,” she notes.

Laserfiche also helps the district attorney’s office operate more efficiently. “We’ve scanned felony case files into Laserfiche, which has been great,” Anderson says. “Our old content manager didn’t have full-text search capability, and it didn’t manage records retention. With RME, it’s easy to manage retention periods, which can range from 25-50 years, and it’s simple to locate information.”

Anderson realized the value of the county’s Laserfiche system when a flood in May 2007 damaged nearly 1,000 boxes of records—many of them with no backup. “It’s clear how important Laserfiche is for business continuity,” she says. “Had those files been stored in Laserfiche, we wouldn’t have needed to worry when the flood waters started rising. People worry about computers crashing, but in reality, paper documents are much more likely to be destroyed than digital ones.”

Laserfiche also offers the flexibility Collin County needs to expand enterprise-wide—while still meeting each department’s unique needs. The county is implementing Laserfiche in the property tax department to digitally store copies of checks, stubs and letters received as part of the annual property tax receipting process. Planning for the next budget cycle includes integrating Laserfiche with SunGard® HTE in the auditor’s office to manage accounts payable documents. The development department also plans to integrate Laserfiche with its existing GIS application to manage septic system records. Eventually, most county records will be stored in Laserfiche and will be viewable over the Internet.

“I’ve been really pleased with the system,” Anderson says. “But what I’m most looking forward to is expanding our records retention plan to include electronic records—which will make us better prepared to comply with e-discovery orders.”

Anderson isn’t the only one who’s pleased. County staff have been so delighted that they’re spreading the word to other departments. “The response to Laserfiche has been so positive, that it’s been difficult to keep up with demand for new installations,” she says. “I’ve just had to start saying ‘No’ nicely—and tell them ‘You’ll just have to learn to wait your turn.’”

That’s the lesson from 2008 Run Smarter Award winner Thurston County, WA. Until implementing Laserfiche in 2007, the rustic county, peppered as it is with forests and Puget Sound waters, was beset with what could best be described as information management logjams.

But in less than two years, Thurston County has evolved its use of Laserfiche from a pilot project handling backlog conversion to the backbone of a department-by-department phenomenon. In short, Thurston County has realized the very essence of what it means to Run Smarter.

The County must have heard other departments’ pleas, because suddenly several departments’ annual IT portfolios had requests for imaging systems. The County’s IT Manager, Brian Ferris, stepped in with the authority from its Information Technology Committee (ITC) and Board of County Commissioners (BOCC), and the search for an enterprise content management (ECM) system was on.

Back in 2006, IT Consultant (and now Laserfiche Administrator) Bonnie Hilyard and appointed imaging committee members were given the task to look at bringing an enterprise content management system into the county for all the departments to use. There was additional urgency because the overflowing records building had already spilled over into a second storage building. “We were looking at possibly needing a third down the road, and we knew we had to stop the insanity,” she recalls.

The imaging committee’s vision for the County’s ECM system was more than simply a virtual storage building. “The system would have to do more than address both our short-term and long-range needs for document imaging. We definitely needed an application that had open architecture, regional support, Web capabilities, document and records management as well as a powerful workflow engine,” she says. “Plus, a huge requirement was the ability to integrate with all of our existing business applications.

The County’s initial goal was to meet current and anticipated business requirements for 10-15 years, promote efficiency of county operations, save the time and costs of filling public record requests, as well as to save storage space. Whatever system they chose would have to allow for decentralized use for all levels of staff through easy desktop access, as well as the ability to integrate primary business applications with the system—all while providing multi-level security features.

What Hilyard and the team were looking for was a solution as enterprise-wise as it was enterprise-wide. Where did she find one?

“The county identified requirements for an Enterprise Imaging system and then released a Request for Proposal based on those requirements. After an extensive review process which included matching the county’s requirements with each proposal and visits to other jurisdictions in Washington and Oregon that used the proposed systems , we determined that Laserfiche was the best choice” Hilyard says.

“One of the biggest moves for us was to be able to certify the system we purchased with the State of Washington State Archives Certification process,” she adds. “This certification would allow us to eventually destroy some of the paper documents that were scanned into the system—a big move for shrinking our storage costs.” This was such a big move, in fact, that Hilyard and her team made sure only records associated with the records retention schedule set by the Secretary of State were added to their system.

Initial implementation was rolled out in three pilot offices: the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC), Prosecuting Attorney’s Office (PAO), and Development Services Department (DevSvcs).

The BOCC had ordinances and resolutions dating back to the 1910s, as well as board meeting minutes that staff scanned into Laserfiche. Almost immediately, citizens and staff could search and print out documents themselves, which was a huge time saver for the board’s secretary. Says Hilyard, “Now she scans them in and they are automatically posted to the Web with WebLink. She can then send an e-mail notifying everyone that it’s posted, and she’s done.”

Next, Hilyard’s team is installing Laserfiche in the PAO, mostly due to the office’s sheer amount of paperwork. By law, cases must be kept for at least 20 years, but this retention period can stretch even longer when the appeals process is included. After an outside vendor scanned 3.7 million pages into TIFF files, Hilyard’s team used Quick Fields to automatically import them into file structures organized by year. As the documents were imported, Laserfiche’s OCR engine automatically extracted searchable text, simplifying retrieval. In 2009, Hilyard says, the PAO hopes to be scanning the documents as they come in, but she’s realistic about the process.

“We know that this transition will be hard on some staff, so we’re not going to completely eliminate the ‘safety folders’ at this time,” she says. “We’re hoping the attorneys will see they can use their laptops to locate all the up-to-date paperwork for the case in the court room or office.”

To help the effort, Hilyard’s team designed a folder structure where each case has its own file folder so all subsequent incoming information could be routed to these folders by staff using Snapshot or through Laserfiche Workflow.

“We decided to go this direction because as a case is closed, Workflow will move the active folder to the Records Management module to begin its records retention,” Hilyard says. The PAO has almost finished linking Laserfiche (through an application programmable interface (API) created by VPCI) with their Damion business application.

Next, Development Services Department technical staff and VPCI programmer are working together to create an API for their business application, Amanda, and Laserfiche using Web tools, a project, Hilyard notes, that is now 80% complete.

With pilot projects underway in the first three departments, Hilyard started looking across all departments to see who could benefit from the relatively new system. She admits, though, that for as inevitable and organic as the County’s enterprise-wide adoption of Laserfiche seems now, it wasn’t always easy.

“Implementing such a large scale roll out has been challenging for myself and our Records Manager. Keeping up with the demand for all the scanning requests has also been a big challenge,” notes Hilyard. “It’s amazing now that the cat is out of the bag how many people in the county are knowledgeable about this technology. I hear no negative comments about the implementation, just a lot of thanks.”

Up next is exploring the possibilities of Laserfiche 8, which TC implemented just this month. “I’m hoping that maybe somewhere along the way I can find the time to learn how to use the Toolkit myself so that I can develop API’s internally,” Hilyard muses.

Somehow, she always finds time to sing the praises of Laserfiche to local governments. “I recommend Laserfiche on an ongoing basis. I share all my stories, documents and knowledge whenever I’m asked,” she says.

“It’s nice to have a community in Washington and Oregon State where we all get together and share. You know you’re not alone and if it’s something that can be done, maybe it’s already done and I don’t have to re-invent it.”

“The philosophy behind many of our technology initiatives,” he explains, “is to present information on the Web, rather than face-to-face. Not only is it a whole lot less expensive, but it’s so much more convenient for citizens.”

Before implementing Laserfiche, completing everyday tasks was far from convenient. Jackson describes the working environment as “Paper, and lots of it. Our business processes were mostly manual and very costly, with regard to both lost productivity and excess paper consumption.”

Gaston County had another document management system in place when Jackson arrived, but it didn’t meet all of the organization’s business needs. “Our previous software lacked Web publishing and OCR capabilities,” he recalls, “and its architecture couldn’t scale to support our more ambitious initiatives or additional departments.”

Keeping in mind both present needs and future plans, Jackson authored an RFP, to which seven vendors responded. While two other solutions provided similar functionality to Laserfiche, none could match its cost-effectiveness. “Return on investment was probably our chief criterion,” he says. “Laserfiche offered the quickest ROI of all the potential solutions.”

It offered fast deployment as well. Within 6 weeks, the environmental health department had scanned paper records of over 55,000 septic system inspections dating back to 1955. Jackson gives much of the credit for Gaston County’s success to its Laserfiche reseller, One Source Document Solutions. “Our reseller has been great to work with, and they’re a great representative for Laserfiche as well,” he says.

The HR, finance and building inspection departments were also part of the pilot installation. “It was really a ‘first come, first served’ process,” Jackson says. “These departments really wanted to be the initial adopters of the new technology.”

In addition to these departmental champions, Laserfiche also found strong political support. Gaston County commissioners had recently passed a resolution enabling deployment of new e-government initiatives—many of which fell right into Laserfiche’s wheelhouse. “Our commissioners are very interested in using technology to reduce costs, so fortunately, we didn’t have major problems getting funding for our Laserfiche system,” Jackson says.

Deploying at the departmental level proved advantageous in convincing decision makers that Laserfiche would support their goals. “It allowed us to present concrete cost savings to commissioners,” Jackson recalls, “so they’d be on board with expanding the system. It also helped us persuade the few skeptical staff members that, when all is said and done, Laserfiche would make everyone’s jobs easier.”

Located on the banks of the Catawba River, the U.S. National Whitewater Center is the world's largest artificial whitewater river and an official U.S. Olympic Training Site.

It turned out that staff didn’t need much persuading at all. “The resistance to change has been far less than for other applications or new business processes,” he adds. “Employees all realize how tedious working with paper is, and that the opportunity to digitize will help them tremendously.”

Indeed, after just one year of using Laserfiche, staff and citizens have already realized many benefits. For example, Laserfiche Records Management Edition™ (RME) has greatly simplified the way staff work with records series. “It’s very easy to establish new records series in RME,” Jackson says, “and when it comes to managing them, staff simply scan documents in and let the system worry about the rest.”

Beyond sophisticated behind-the-scenes records management, staff greatly benefit from one of the most basic Laserfiche functions. “Laserfiche gives staff the ability to search in so many different ways,” Jackson notes. “For research and information requests, it’s really reduced the amount of information staff need to find what they’re looking for.”

In a recent case study, the building inspections department documented just how much more efficient they’ve become thanks to Laserfiche searching. With 6,000 building permits filed yearly, staff spent an estimated five hours per day filing and handling research calls. Because they can now index and retrieve documents automatically with Laserfiche, they’ve reduced the time spent answering those calls by 75%—saving almost half a man-year of work.

And that’s just in a single department. “We know that once we start deploying to larger departments, the savings will mount up into the millions of dollars,” Jackson says.

From an IT perspective, Laserfiche offers many advantages to Jackson and his staff. First and foremost among these is ease of administration. “We’re a Windows®-based shop, so we really appreciate the way Laserfiche integrates with Active Directory®. That made it really easy to fit Laserfiche into our operating environment.”

Because deployment was so smooth, Laserfiche delivered quickly on its promises. “Many solutions have the potential to increase productivity or lower costs,” he adds, “but are very difficult to set up. With Laserfiche, the upfront investment to attain these kinds of benefits is very low.”

With such rapid results, it wasn’t long before other departments were lining up to request their own Laserfiche systems—a common occurrence among new Laserfiche users. “Once other departments saw the benefits that the pilot departments were reaping, they came to IT and said ‘sign us up,’” Jackson remembers.

In response to these departmental demands, the 2008 Gaston County IT strategic plan includes a major expansion of their Laserfiche system. Planned enhancements include integrating Laserfiche with their redesigned GIS system, so that staff and citizens can retrieve parcel information and tax histories. The emergency medical services department will begin storing patient records and ambulance call histories within Laserfiche—which will help answer HIPAA compliance challenges. Meanwhile, the county attorney’s office will use the Workflow™ module to simplify the contract review process by automatically routing contracts for approval.

Workflow will also play a major role in some very sophisticated e-government applications. “We’re developing Web forms that will send information straight to Workflow,” Jackson says. “For example, employment applications submitted online will go straight to HR for initial screening, then on to hiring departments, who will route back the applications of individuals they want to interview or extend offers to.” Similar technology will enable citizens to submit permit applications and pay taxes online as well. And the building inspection department, one of the earliest adopters of Laserfiche, has become the first county department to go paperless, after receiving state approval for self-warranty in May 2008.

Internal business process improvements notwithstanding, the number-one goal of implementing Laserfiche was to improve citizen service. The citizens’ response? “They love it,” Jackson says. “Having building inspection reports online has been a major success. They can’t believe how much time they save. Previously, they had to call us, come into the office or travel to an inspection site. Now, they have on-demand access to all that information.”

Not bad for the first year. But Jackson is gearing up for bigger and better things. “I knew that digital document management would be a major asset, not only in the short term, but also further on down the road. I really anticipate that, within five years, Laserfiche will become as widely-used as e-mail.”

One of the largest issues concerns ineligible voters coming to the polls. To keep voting fair and above board, it’s imperative to keep track of who can vote and who cannot, especially in elections where the difference between winning and losing could come down to just a few votes.

A number of issues could deny someone their vote. For example, they may not be registered in that particular county, they may have recently moved or they may have been convicted of a felony. These reasons are legitimate but aren’t always apparent to voters and polling station workers. In the past, these issues have caused contention, but in Lubbock County, these questions are now quickly answered by staff at the Voter Registration Office.

Dorothy Kennedy, Assistant Chief Deputy for Voter Registration in Lubbock, and her staff used Laserfiche to scan voter registration information so it could be easily indexed and searched. Armed with the voter’s name, registration officials can now perform a quick search to gather all the information they need.

That information is important to have, according to Cody Bettis of Lubbock-based VP Imaging, a Laserfiche reseller. Bettis adds that, because of the confusion, ineligible people could slip through the cracks and vote.

Previously, to answer inquiries, Kennedy had to search through storage rooms overflowing with voter registration cards, change of address forms and change of surname information. Considering that each of Lubbock County’s 154,000 registered voters could have 4 or 5 documents on file, it was often difficult to locate one particular document. “Voter registration takes up a lot of room,” Kennedy says.

Prospective voters would sometimes have to wait weeks to find out, from a judge, why they weren’t eligible to vote. On Election Day, many would be turned away from the polling booths with no explanation, except that their names weren’t on file. “Voter registration doesn’t follow you,” says Kennedy, who wants voters to be aware that it is up to the individual to keep the Voter Registration Office up-to-date on name and address changes. But thanks to Laserfiche, this information will now be at election officials’ fingertips on Election Day.

Imaging Supervisor Marc St. Laurent.

The Kern County Superior Court has a metropolitan division in Bakersfield, CA, and three regional divisions with seven branches. Staff had been microfilming case files for many years, but, according to Imaging Supervisor Marc St. Laurent, this solution was far from ideal. “Microfilm was never a good storage medium,” he explains. “Court cases can be active for many years, so we frequently need to add probation reports or other information to the case file. We had to re-film entire files when we added a single piece of paper, and it was very difficult to find information.”

Staff knew they had to replace this antiquated archiving system, so they began searching for a flexible, cost-effective solution that would meet everyone’s needs. “We knew we needed to make files more accessible for judges, but the technology had to be extremely user-friendly,” St. Laurent says. “Our court clerk also needed to respond to records requests more quickly. In fact, we wanted to make case files immediately available, rather than making customers wait 2-3 days.”

The court chose to implement a Laserfiche^® digital document management solution because it met all these needs. “Our previous clerk was very technology-minded, and he really grabbed the bull by the horns,” St. Laurent remembers. “We didn’t have any technology in the regional courts—in fact, most of our branches were storing files in trailers in the parking lot. So we knew the regional courts were a great place to start rolling out our solution.”

The deployment began with a pilot project in the Lamont regional court, chosen for its smaller size and lower case volume. The court freed up space, improved file accessibility and provided better service, proving that Laserfiche could meet the needs of Kern County’s other courts. Best of all, judges were comfortable with the solution—once they realized that files, in St. Laurent’s words, “were not going to disappear into the ether.”

Fly fishing in the Kern River.

After the successful deployment in Lamont, the court expanded its Laserfiche system county-wide. The enterprise deployment began with court staff scanning closed files. “We began scanning adjudicated case files so they are securely archived,” St. Laurent says. “We’ve gone back six years on felonies and three and a half years on misdemeanors. We’d eventually like to start scanning at the counter, but right now we have such a large backlog of files, we’re just trying to deal with that.”

Staff at each court use Laserfiche to scan case files into the central repository in Bakersfield. The court uses Laserfiche’s flexible file structure to organize its repository by division, and then by year, date and case number. To automate this process, the county’s reseller, DataNet Solutions, designed a custom integration that not only creates the file structure, but also integrates with the state judicial database, the California Justice Information System (CJIS). “This customization is just wonderful,” St. Laurent says. “All our staff have to do is enter the case number, and Laserfiche automatically pulls the name, date of birth and other pertinent information directly from CJIS. Not only does this ensure quality control, it also limits manual data entry, which speeds up filing.” Eventually, the court plans to expand the integration to include CLASS ACT, the state’s civil, family law and probate database.

After files are scanned into the repository, over 300 users county-wide access them using nothing more than their Web browsers—thanks to Laserfiche WebLink™. “WebLink is great, because there’s no software installation required,” St. Laurent says. “Our IT staff find Laserfiche extremely easy to support. We have two staff members managing Laserfiche from the network end, and, because of WebLink, they’re able to handle everything countywide from our Bakersfield location. It’s really a smooth process.”

A view from “The Needles” in the Sequoia National Forest.

And it isn’t just IT staff who appreciate Laserfiche. Court staff find it useful, too—just not in the ways you might expect.

While staff definitely benefit from improved access to information, it’s the security features, like blackout and whiteout redactions, that they really appreciate. “It seems like such a small thing, but to them, it’s extremely important because it’s so useful. They don’t have to take markers to black out witnesses’ names or addresses on arrest reports anymore—there’s been a lot of excitement over that feature,” St. Laurent explains.

Since deploying Laserfiche county-wide four years ago, court staff have eliminated approximately 40,000 files from their records room. Now, instead of calling the records center and waiting for records to be delivered, clerks simply open Laserfiche and retrieve the files they need. When another branch requests felony case files from the Bakersfield office, staff scan the files into Laserfiche, rather than mailing a physical copy. With Laserfiche, authorized staff in any location can instantly retrieve these files—eliminating lost files and saving both time and money.

“Customers probably don’t notice much from the front end, because Laserfiche helps us deal with cases that are already disposed of,” St. Laurent says. “But it has certainly made us more efficient behind the scenes.”

But some customers have noticed the difference. Before Laserfiche, customers seeking files from the regional courts would have to travel to the metro division in Bakersfield. “From the court in Ridgecrest to metro division in Bakersfield is a two and a half hour drive, one-way,” St. Laurent says. “But with Laserfiche, we can help people right at the counter, even if they’re at the wrong building.”

St. Laurent remembers when Laserfiche helped court staff cope with a quintuple murder trial, one of the biggest trials in the county’s history. “About 500 potential jurors were brought in for questioning, and the media wanted access to their questionnaires,” he remembers. “The judge had the idea that, instead of copying hundreds of eight-page jury questionnaires for reporters, we’d scan them into Laserfiche. We created a public folder reporters could access from the media center, which saved our staff a lot of time.

The Kern River valley is a haven for rock climbers.

“The system worked beautifully, and it really exposed the court at large to Laserfiche’s benefits,” he continues. “Because this is a death penalty case, it will automatically be appealed. We’re hoping that the appellate court will let us submit the jury questionnaires on disc.”

Eventually, court staff hope that more county departments will use Laserfiche to enable more efficient information sharing. The sheriff’s department and other law enforcement agencies already have access to restraining orders stored in Laserfiche. Court staff scan the orders into the Laserfiche repository, providing law enforcement officers and 911 dispatchers with immediate access—something that St. Laurent says has definitely increased public safety.

The public defender’s office is also using Laserfiche, and St. Laurent hopes the probation department will be next in line. “This would be very effective. There’s a lot of document flow between our two organizations, and it would be great to have probation reports immediately available to judges at sentencing hearings,” he says.

For the Kern County Superior Court, Laserfiche has proved to be a wise investment, one which St. Laurent would recommend to other courts. “Laserfiche is here to stay as far as our court operations are concerned. You don’t lose files once they’re captured, it’s simple to add information to case files, even years after the fact, and it’s good for customers. It’s a fantastic solution.”

The York County Clerk of Courts Office uses a Laserfiche® digital document management system to manage criminal court records for the York County Court of Common Pleas, whose records are used by 25 other county departments. With over 8,000 cases processed annually and more than $9 million collected in costs, fines and restitution, managing the related documents is a big job.

Senior Project Administrator Mary Jane McCluskey.

Before implementing Laserfiche, York County faced what Information Services Department Senior Project Administrator Mary Jane McCluskey calls a “‘sneakernet’ nightmare,” with paper copies as the only reliable means of circulating information. Searching for documents which could be located on any one of sixteen clerks’ desks was becoming increasingly costly. Not to mention that older documents resided five miles offsite and communicating with the county prison—also located five miles away—relied on easily-misplaced faxes.

“With the prison, people were often quicker than the process,” McCluskey says. “New inmates would be turned away because their paperwork hadn’t arrived and the prison didn’t expect them. Or the family would arrive to pick up a released inmate, and the prison wouldn’t know the case disposition, so they wouldn’t be able to do anything.”

After a successful pilot project to digitize minutes from board meetings, York County began digitizing court files in 2005. The first step was to identify major categories or topics of filings, such as “motion-petition-order” or “disposition-sentencing,” which streamlined file organization in Laserfiche. “My staff put their institutional knowledge to work and developed 17 criteria, or file chapters, from the myriad filings we receive daily,” says Clerk of Courts Don O’Shell. “Wendy Bossard, our judicial services manager, and Kathy Groff, our records unit manager, deserve tremendous credit for developing the basic building blocks of our electronic file structure in Laserfiche.”

In 2006, the office began scanning all incoming filings, with the goal of imaging all filings within four hours, or by the next business day for documents received after 3:00 P.M. Staff established a rush process, whereby documents requiring more rapid processing are rushed directly to imaging, docketed and forwarded to a judge, serviced to the sheriff or district attorney, or sent along to defense counsel.

On the recommendation of their reseller, DocuScan USA, the county also set up a system to simplify scanning and filing. They implemented Quick Fields™ with Pattern Matching and Real Time Lookup™, which pulls the case number from the state database and creates a folder structure. Quick Fields also automatically sorts and files case documents, which minimizes staff training. “All we have to do is create batch header sheets with bar codes, and Quick Fields does the rest,” says Front Counter Supervisor Garth Bambling. “It takes seconds for front counter clerks to create batch header sheets, which are attached to the documents and then sent back for scanning.”

The Gates and Plough Complex reflects private and public life in Colonial York.

County-wide access to the Laserfiche repository means that other departments can view scanned documents as they need them, eliminating the need to copy documents multiple times and significantly reducing file requests—making the court and related departments much more efficient. This reduces the need for overtime and promotes better relations among departments, given that staff in other parts of county government can instantly access case files maintained in the clerk’s office. The prison records office also has access to case dispositions and court documents in a searchable format, which eliminates the problem of misplaced documents, as well as the need to physically fax or transport paper records.

The office’s Laserfiche repository stores everything from criminal and juvenile records to miscellaneous docket files, summary appeals and administration files. By early 2006, all files had been imaged from the front end, and, in summer 2006, staff began the back-scanning process. “We had four million documents from 2000 on alone,” McCluskey says, “and we needed to be able to give the judges, probation staff, district attorneys and public defenders access to those documents.”

But not everyone immediately saw value in digitizing case files. “Certain members of the court expressed their preference that imaging take a back seat to the docketing and servicing of court filings, and said that imaging should be accomplished on the back end, instead of on the front end,” O’Shell remembers. “Some even went as far as to cite potential contempt of court proceedings if imaging wasn’t relegated to solely an archival process.”

Yet once the 2006 and 2007 files were digitized, judges began asking for even more documents online. “They found that it made research easy,” McCluskey says, “and they liked being able to immediately respond to questions from attorneys, probation officers and the public.”

To help judges and staff further embrace the new system, McCluskey and her colleagues started a hands-on training program to train staff during the judges’ lunch hour. “This is an ongoing project,” McCluskey says. “We’re training other departments as well. When we first implemented the system, we gave users access to it before we’d trained them, and some users became slightly frustrated because they didn’t realize everything the system could do. We definitely learned from that.”

The Snyder’s of Hanover bakery tour is a favorite in the “Factory Tour Capital of the World.”

And that wasn’t the only thing McCluskey learned. “With a big project like this, it’s important to think in terms of years, not months,” she says. “Just realize that success builds upon success—just focus on getting one thing accomplished, then move on to the next thing. Work in small steps, and before you know it, you’re done.”

The York County program doesn’t just provide faster access to case files, it also helps to ensure business continuity. McCluskey chairs an initiative to develop a countywide continuity of operations plan, of which Laserfiche is a key component. “This is a three-year project that moves far beyond disaster recovery,” she says. “We focus not just on technology, but also people, process and location to identify vulnerability. With departments that only have paper files, like our public defender or our mental health department, what happens if they can’t get back into their building for months? What happens if the files are gone entirely?”

In fall 2007, York County implemented a pilot program to give attorneys access to case files over the Web, and hopes to extend the system even further. The county also plans to implement Laserfiche in both the central booking division of the sheriff’s department and in the children and youth services department, where cases are often open for more than 20 years. The benefits have been so great that the clerk’s office would like to receive superior and supreme court appeals electronically, and they’d like to install touch screens in the courtroom so clerks can enter information and send it to Laserfiche even more quickly.

The progress the county courts have made is impressive. “To us, the biggest change is that the judges who refused to give up paper—the same ones who were threatening us with contempt of court charges if we couldn’t give them immediate access to case files—are now the system’s biggest advocates,” O’Shell says. “We even had one judge tell us the system was ‘better than sliced bread.’ ”

Prior to issuing an RFP, the county’s decision makers selected four departments—corrections, finance, human services and environmental services—to participate in a pilot document imaging program. They then assembled a committee that included staff from each department. “Because everyone would eventually use the system, we involved as many people as possible in the decision-making process,” Berg explains. “We wanted to approach the implementation from a county-wide perspective rather than an IT perspective.”

Working with a consultant, IT staff wrote an RFP for an enterprise document management solution. After evaluating the responses, the committee invited four vendors to demo their systems. “Laserfiche^® ranked the highest,” Grossmann remembers. “Staff said Laserfiche had features they could use, while the other systems were unnecessarily complicated.”

Staff in the pilot departments started scanning documents into Laserfiche in 2002, and Berg and Grossmann noticed immediate results. With Laserfiche, staff can retrieve documents in seconds, without leaving their desks. In addition, the Laserfiche Workflow™ module automatically routes documents among staff members, eliminating the need to physically carry file folders between desks or departments. Laserfiche even streamlines the audit process—now, auditors simply sit at a workstation and use the system’s search tools to find what they need, while staff go about their business.

Because the county uses a variety of primary business applications, integration also played a key role in the committee’s selection of Laserfiche. “From the outset, we knew that we needed a solution that could serve as the document management ‘back-end’ for our other applications, without requiring elaborate custom programming,” Grossmann says. With its open architecture and flexible API, Laserfiche fully met this need. “Our Laserfiche reseller, Crabtree Companies, did an excellent job of explaining what we could do with the system,” she adds. “They helped us get started, but we completed most of the integrations ourselves.”

Located in the county seat of Mankato, the Blue Earth County courthouse was built in 1886.

One of the county’s most visible integrations is between Laserfiche and MUNIS^®, which the finance department uses to manage accounts payable. When the department receives an invoice, staff enter information—such as the invoice’s date, number and amount—in MUNIS. At the click of a button, they then open the Laserfiche scanning interface within MUNIS and scan the document into the Laserfiche repository. Thanks to the tight integration between the two systems, Laserfiche automatically pulls relevant document metadata from MUNIS and uses this information to index the scanned image file.

Retrieving a scanned document is equally quick. Staff simply locate the invoice record in MUNIS, then click a button to retrieve it from Laserfiche. Because the integration is so seamless, a lot of users don’t even realize that documents are stored in another system.

For Berg, the MUNIS integration truly exemplifies how Laserfiche has helped the county improve internal work processes. “In the past, retrieving an invoice would literally take days,” he says. “First, I’d log in to our financial application and look up the invoice’s number. I’d then have to call the finance department and submit my request. When staff in that department had time, they’d locate the original invoice, make a photocopy and put it in the interoffice mail.”

Because this process was so slow, Berg began photocopying every invoice he received, so he’d have it for future reference. “I was storing thousands of invoices in my office, and each year the pile would grow higher and higher,” he says. “Using Laserfiche, I can literally find any invoice I need in a matter of seconds, and my office is a lot less cluttered.”

Reducing paper clutter also translates into additional cost savings for the county, because departments can make better use of available space. By scanning its case files into Laserfiche, the corrections department, for example, has eliminated the need for a records room altogether. The 900 square foot space previously needed to house paper now serves as an office for four staff members.

Currently, fourteen of the county’s fifteen departments use Laserfiche, and the county’s repository holds more than six million documents. Using the Integrator’s Toolkit™, IT staff have integrated Laserfiche with several other systems, including the county’s Unisys^® mainframe and the Fidlar^® system it uses to manage property records. These integrations have proven so successful that, as part of the RFP process, the county now requires software vendors to confirm that their applications integrate with Laserfiche.

IT staff have several initiatives planned for the year ahead, including an integration between Laserfiche and the county’s GIS application. They also plan to use the WebLink™ module to provide citizens with online access to a variety of documents, from agendas and meeting minutes to property, birth and death records. They’ll also continue one of their most successful programs—hiring developmentally disabled residents to scan archived documents into the Laserfiche repository.

When asked about the lessons she and her colleagues learned during the implementation process, Grossmann emphasizes the importance of active communication between IT staff and the system’s users. “We definitely had to manage users’ expectations,” she says. “Our probation officers, for example, didn’t want to give up their paper files—we literally had to take them away. But once we showed them how the new system worked, they clearly saw its benefits.

“Thanks to an integration between Laserfiche and our court services tracking system, the officers can access scanned documents with a single click. And they no longer have to carry armloads of case files around. Instead, they simply take their laptops into the field and, using VPN, they connect to the Laserfiche repository and call up any document they need.”

The Kennedy Bridge is one of the few surviving wrought iron bridges in Minnesota.

Other users, she continues, tried to recreate their old work processes in Laserfiche, which often prevented them from making the best use of the system’s tools. “In our corrections department, for instance, the paper files were so thick that they included section dividers, and staff were in the habit of locating a particular form by looking in ‘Section Four’ or ‘Section Six.’

“As part of the process of scanning these files, users attempted to recreate this familiar filing structure in Laserfiche. We had to step in and explain that electronic section dividers or subfolders weren’t necessary, because the system’s search tools would help them quickly find what they need, without having to manually navigate through a complex folder structure.

“We even had a few users who thought that managing documents electronically would add to their workload, or that they’d have to hire additional staff to do all the scanning,” Grossmann concludes. “When we heard this, we simply pointed to our pilot program and all the success we had. Far from adding to anyone’s workload, Laserfiche has provided staff with much faster access to information, leaving them with more time to help the county’s citizens.”

For prosecuting attorneys, cases revolve around overstuffed paper file folders, and the Eaton County prosecutor’s office was spending a large amount of time shuffling paper. “We spent up to 50 percent of our time in the office working with the case file folder—and we weren’t using the time, we were wasting it,” says Jeffrey L. Sauter, the county’s prosecuting attorney.

The process of digitizing paper files began in October 2003, when Dr. Robert Sobie, Eaton County’s information services director, suggested that Sauter’s office digitally archive closed files and scan active files. Sauter had one simple question: “Do you think you can eliminate all this paper?”

A resounding “yes” came in the form of a Laserfiche® digital document management solution. With a simple integration, case files scanned and stored in Laserfiche link to the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan’s Adult Case Tracking System (ACTS) and Juvenile Case Tracking System (JCTS), the case management systems (CMS) used by 78 of the 83 prosecutors in Michigan. While that system was great for managing schedules, attorneys still relied on paper progress notes and case documents. Now, from within the CMS, attorneys or staff simply click a button to create case notes that are automatically filed in Laserfiche for easy retrieval.

Reducing paper consumption was a big plus, but the biggest efficiency gains happened when the prosecutor’s office began scanning in current files. In January 2004, they began transitioning between paper and electronic files, and a year later, the office stopped creating paper misdemeanor files entirely.

“We went slowly,” Sauter remembers, “but once we realized the sky hadn’t fallen, we stopped making paper felony files. These are more serious cases, and eliminating paper files entirely made some of our attorneys nervous. But within a month, we noticed how much more efficient we were.”

Eaton County structured their Laserfiche filing system around the criminal transaction number, which the CMS automatically generates. “We have ‘frequent fliers,’ habitual criminals with multiple case files, so it was no use to search by name,” Sauter says. Once the CMS creates the case file, the assigned attorney then reviews it, highlighting the authorization or denial of the charges in Laserfiche. Laserfiche’s sticky note annotation feature enables attorneys to provide detailed analysis and charging instructions directly on the documents.

The police department and defense attorneys have started submitting police reports, pre-trial motions and other documents electronically, eliminating scanning and shredding. “90 percent of our police reports are sent electronically, with photos and videos sent on disk,” Sauter says. “We use Snapshot™ to send them to our repository. Defense attorneys submit their documents to our department e-mail address, and we e-mail documents to them as well. The defense attorneys like it so much—because the court sends documents via US mail, they often have our discovery documents days before they even know they’ve been assigned the case.”

After implementing Laserfiche, the prosecutor’s office withdrew their request for an additional legal secretary, only one month after beginning to scan felony files. In addition, they saved more than $10,000 in clerical staffing costs and decreased office supply usage by nearly 35 percent. “These additional savings are annual, not one-time savings,” Sauter comments. “In fact, I expect my supplies budget to decrease even more next year.”

While their Laserfiche system worked well, Sauter wanted to extend its benefits outside the prosecutor’s office. “The interface was great,” he said, “but our attorneys needed files in court. I talked to Dr. Sobie, and we switched our attorneys from desktop computers to laptops, and we also extended a county wireless network into courtrooms and conference rooms.”

With wireless access from the courtroom, attorneys who are in court can also e-mail their colleagues back in the office with questions pertaining to case law. “We get a lot of S.O.S. e-mails from the courtroom, of the ‘Help, the judge is about to rule against me’ type,” Sauter comments.

Eaton County uses Laserfiche to store audio of all 911 calls, so attorneys can access them instantly from within the CMS. Having evidence at the ready makes pretrial conferences faster and easier, because prosecutors can present their evidence, convincing defense attorneys and defendants of the wisdom of a plea bargain. “Honestly, it provides many quick resolutions to cases that likely would have gone to trial instead—which is a huge advantage for taxpayers,” Sauter says.

Laserfiche also makes managing electronic evidence and complying with e-discovery orders much easier. “We can instantly search documents to find information in witness statements, which makes it easier to impeach those witnesses on the stand,” Sauter says. “The text is right there, and with the ‘hit list’ showing bolded lines of context, it’s quick to find information, which we can save to use during the trial.”

And that’s not to mention the benefit of having photographs and other evidence at the ready when the witness is on the stand. Sauter recalls using Laserfiche for the first time during a double murder trial. “Because it was the first big case without the paper file, I wanted to take it to set an example for the other prosecutors in the office,” he remembers.

With diagrams and crime scene photos stored in Laserfiche, Sauter explained the sequence of events to the jury. “This proved very effective,” he says. “I used the Laserfiche digital zoom feature to focus on specific areas of the crime scene photos. The jury found that very impressive.”

In the future, Eaton County plans to use Laserfiche Workflow 8™ to further automate case workflow. The new system will automatically notify attorneys of cases by e-mail, as well as automatically notify police when charges are filed.

Sauter and his team are so committed to educating prosecutors about the benefit of a paperless office that their Website provides an extensive review of their file management system, as well as training videos prepared by office staff. Sauter also speaks at industry conferences about Eaton County’s successes with Laserfiche.

“Paperless file management is not an ‘if,’ it’s a ‘when,’” Sauter says. “Our change has led to a revolutionary improvement in how we do the people’s business, and it’s a harbinger of the future for many other prosecutors’ offices.”

Corporation Counsel Lincoln Ashida recalls that the situation was “slightly embarrassing” when he assumed office several years ago. A 100-foot-long hallway was lined with bankers’ boxes full of files, and additional boxes were housed in other county buildings—including the basement of an old hospital. Locating a legal opinion, letter or other document often involved asking a senior employee if they could remember where the item had been stored.

“We were practicing law in a vacuum,” Ashida says. “The closest thing we had to an ‘information repository’ was the collective memories of the employees who had served the most years in our office.” Ashida particularly remembers the negative impact such inefficiency had on both service delivery and the office’s credibility. “Sometimes, our clients had to produce copies of legal records for us because our staff either could not locate them or, worse, said that no such records existed.”

Sensing the urgency of the situation, Ashida and his staff began researching digital document management. After reviewing several systems, they selected Laserfiche®, primarily because of its ease of use and powerful search tools.

Once the installation was complete, staff began to scan legal opinions and other documents into the Laserfiche repository. As part of the scanning process, optical character recognition (OCR) technology indexes every word in every document. Thanks to this technology, staff can now easily perform keyword searches across the hundreds of thousands of documents that reside in the repository—something that was impossible when the office relied on a paper-based system.

Martha Rodillas, secretary to the corporation counsel, explains that keyword searches are particularly valuable when attorneys need to determine whether the office has addressed a particular issue in the past. “Prior to issuing a new opinion, our attorneys need to know whether our office has opined on this issue before and, if so, whether the opinion needs to be updated,” she says. “If there is nothing on point, there may be opinions on similar issues that can aid the attorneys in drafting their opinion. Finding these documents is critical for attorneys to do their jobs effectively.”

From left to right: Katherine Garson, Lincoln Ashida and Martha Rodillas.

In addition to its comprehensive search capabilities, Laserfiche includes a number of other features that help the office’s staff to do their jobs more effectively. For example, customized template fields enable staff to record key document metadata, such as the date on which a document was approved for release and the name of the person who approved it. Electronic redaction tools enable staff to obscure sensitive information prior to releasing a document, while the ability to e-mail documents to clients from within the Laserfiche repository saves staff time and reduces photocopying costs. Publishing documents to CD has proved particularly valuable in speeding up the discovery process, because the office can provide opposing counsel with trial exhibits on a single disc, rather than having to ship multiple boxes of paper files.

Deputy Corporation Counsel Katherine Garson believes that one case in particular illustrates the ways Laserfiche has helped the office better serve its constituents. The case, which had been pending for more than two years, was scheduled to go to trial in August 2007. In mid-May, one of the attorneys assigned to the case decided to retire, while the other left to head another county department. This meant that the office had to get two new attorneys up to speed on the case and ready for trial—in less than 90 days.

Depositions were scheduled for June and July, and there was no way the attorneys would be able to read through the seventeen boxes of documents associated with the case prior to deposing the witnesses. Without missing a beat, staff immediately set to work scanning these documents into the Laserfiche repository so that the attorneys could quickly search through them to locate vital information. As part of the scanning process, staff also applied a special template to the most important documents, in which they recorded the document’s date. This metadata later proved critical when the attorneys needed to reconstruct the timeline in which certain events in the case occurred.

Garson recalls that during the depositions, the county’s attorneys were just as prepared as the other side’s, even though they’d only been working on the case for a matter of weeks. Thanks to Laserfiche, the county’s attorneys could also quickly call up exhibits on their computer screens, rather than having to rummage through boxes or file folders. “Perhaps the most memorable part of these depositions,” she says, “was intimidating the other attorneys with our organization.”

The week before the trial was set to begin, the county received a settlement offer from the other side. “It was a great deal for the county, and we’re glad we were able to settle the case without going to trial,” Garson says. “But it’s important to note that, thanks to Laserfiche, our attorneys were ready for the trial, despite the fact that they’d just been assigned to the case.”

The office is currently in the process of installing Web Access™ so that attorneys can access the Laserfiche repository while they’re in court or attending meetings away from the office. Ashida and his staff also have plans to implement the Audit Trail™ module to track user activity and the Quick Fields™ Bates Numbering utility to automatically assign an identifier to each scanned document. And Rodillas definitely plans to attend the 2008 Laserfiche Institute Conference to build on everything she learned last year.

Whatever the future holds, Ashida is confident that Laserfiche will continue to help his office provide exemplary service. “Our office vision statement is, ‘We are the answer.’ Laserfiche has furthered this vision by helping us readily answer our clients’ questions, whether by producing an organized history of all the documents associated with a certain case or controversy, locating legal opinions concerning any subject matter, or organizing the large numbers of documents in our litigation files,” he says. “Ultimately, no software, program or other tool has been as valuable to our office as Laserfiche.”

“The Office of the Corporation Counsel shows how digital document management can streamline every aspect of the municipal attorney’s workflow, from conducting research to exchanging information with opposing counsel to preparing exhibits for trial.”

Nien-Ling Wacker
Laserfiche CEO
(Shown with Martha Rodillas)

Laserfiche President and CEO Nien-Ling Wacker discussed the office during her recent keynote address at Hawaii’s Fifth Annual Statewide Municipal Attorney’s Training Conference. “The Office of the Corporation Counsel shows how digital document management can streamline every aspect of the municipal attorney’s workflow, from conducting research to exchanging information with opposing counsel to preparing exhibits for trial,” she says. “I congratulate the office on the efficiency gains and cost savings they’ve realized, and I invite other municipal attorneys to look to the County of Hawaii to see how digital document management fits the rhythm of the way attorneys work.”

Rodillas agrees with this assessment: “We would definitely recommend Laserfiche to other municipal attorneys and government offices, and we invite other municipal attorneys who are considering Laserfiche or who are just getting started with Laserfiche to contact us.” In fact, the office has been so successful that the county plans to install Laserfiche in seven additional departments in 2008. These departments, like the Office of the Corporation Counsel, will receive technical support from ECS Imaging, a Laserfiche reseller based in Riverside, CA.

Rodillas thinks back to the days before Laserfiche, when finding a critical document involved searching through the hundreds of bankers’ boxes lining the hallway. “Laserfiche has certainly taken us to a higher level,” she says.

After a little over a year in the county’s Department of Architecture and Engineering, Knotts is making it his personal mission to “bring the department into the twenty-first century” when it comes to document management. With 40 years’ experience in the accounting, data processing and operations auditing fields, Knotts was well-prepared to identify which of the department’s work processes needed improvement, as well as which solutions to implement to achieve results.

Knotts made replacing the cumbersome process of rummaging through drawers and unfolding oversized drawings, frequently 42 inches wide, a top priority. A growing staff and limited physical storage space were also big motivators.

“We did research with our IT guys and looked at many different digital document management systems. I was most impressed with Laserfiche. Initially, I liked that it looked very much like Windows® in its interface—that was going to make searches much easier for a staff with varying degrees of technological sophistication. That’s what really piqued my interest—ease of use.

“Our reseller was a former San Bernardino County employee, so he knew the county fairly well,” says Knotts. “When he and I started talking about the particulars of the software, it really seemed like a perfect fit. And when I looked at the price, I was completely sold. It was absolutely a dead giveaway compared to some of the other systems I looked at, so we knew that we wouldn’t have any difficulty getting the approvals we needed for funding.”

Knotts knows the ins and outs of transforming government work processes, having spent 20 years implementing improvements in the provincial government of British Columbia, Canada. Under Knotts’ watch, the province implemented a rigorous records retention policy for all provincial documents. All the planning involved in creating the records retention policies and procedures helped him greatly in preparing San Bernardino County for its pilot Laserfiche implementation.

Once he purchased the product, Knotts soon realized that the department had to upgrade its servers to use it. Without missing a beat he delved into the overhaul, taking the opportunity to design the imaging system while the long-overdue upgrade took place. Every experience Knotts had with the Laserfiche community told him that the results would be well worth the effort.

“I went to the Laserfiche Institute Conference, and that was absolutely the best thing I’ve ever been to. With some help from Laserfiche staff, I signed up for the perfect classes; each one built on the previous session. I’ve been to a lot of conferences and I’ve never been to anything that comes close to it.

“It was excellent—right down to the lunch organized by industry. I talked to people who understand what I’m going through. Wherever we are, we do many of the same things. We’re all being killed by paper, and we can all learn from each other. I’ll definitely go back next year, and I’ll bring the staffer responsible for document management on a daily basis and helping our staff use the system.”

The pristine shores of Lake Arrowhead are a destination for many Southern Californians.

What Knotts learned at the conference bolstered his belief that Laserfiche was the right choice. But he was eager to get a handle on the nuts and bolts of the software, so he installed Laserfiche on his laptop. Learning the product before full implementation has helped Knotts visualize how he wants the system set up. “I’ve been a systems manager for a long time,” he says, “but my real ‘bent’ is assessing software to see if it’ll do what we need it to do, then getting it to do just that.” Knotts and his colleagues are carefully developing policies to ensure smooth operations once the system is up and running.

“I’ve created a folder structure, I’ve done briefcases and I’ve played around a little with Snapshot™ when bringing in scanned documents,” says Knotts. “I’ve also looked at the security features to determine how we’re going to set that up. We’ll do a full day’s training for the person who will become the document management clerk. We’ve just done a PO with an organization to handle our back-file conversion. When that’s done, we’ll actively start using the system.

“I’m trying to make sure we have the processes in place so we can seamlessly scan in new documents,” he continues. “In the end, I think that we’re going to be better off for taking our time on the front end. I’m really sold on this package—I believe that Laserfiche’s uses for the county are limitless, and if I do it right, others will be much more willing and ready to look closely at its capabilities.”

With that in mind, Knotts has been considering the challenges that other departments might face. “There’s another department within the same building that probably has ten times as many pages as we do. At the Laserfiche Institute Conference, I met the director of public works for the City of Chula Vista, CA. I mentioned my concern about the number of pages we had and I wondered if the system could handle it. He laughed and said, ‘We’re well over a quarter of a million pages and I have absolutely no problem.’”

Knotts plans to enable his staff to access documents over the Web. But some staff have wondered how to view oversized documents without zooming or scrolling. Knotts has that covered: “I’m going to hook up a 42-inch plasma screen so they can look at the whole thing at once. We’ll have a large-format printer and a plotter attached to it so they can print whatever pages they want.

“Now, if someone wants a copy of a drawing, they go into this large room, go through a book to find it, pull it out of a drawer, then print it on an off-size printer—it’s a really inefficient, labor- intensive and time-consuming process,” he adds. “My vision is that the system will make all of the staff more efficient by accessing documents on their PCs. We’ll reclaim about 2,000 square feet of storage space, which will accommodate a growing staff as the county expands its Capital Improvement Program.

“Our office often copies architectural drawings for other county offices, and manual searching and copying takes up about ten hours a week—time we can’t afford,” he continues. “Laserfiche will help us dramatically reduce that time, and the time it takes people to travel from other offices. We’ll be able to move toward telecommuting, so that we can more efficiently manage our projects, no matter where they are.”

Word of the department’s pilot program is already spreading throughout the county. Says Knotts, “I’ve spoken with a number of departments that are anxiously waiting for us to get this system up and running so that I can start showing their people what we are doing and what is possible. I know they’re going to be very impressed.”

“All the enhancements coming in Laserfiche 8—multi-value template fields, the Recycle Bin, the new Workflow interface—will greatly improve our existing work processes. I can’t wait to beta-test it.”

Michael Wells
Laserfiche Administrator

For IT maven and Laserfiche Administrator Michael Wells, the system is always evolving. He recalls the conversion from paper to document imaging. “The original motivation was to get rid of paper and to allow sharing of documents internally.” In 2001, the IT staff installed Laserfiche in five pilot departments. “All of those departments are still happy users,” says Wells.

Laserfiche has certainly simplified life for Kevin Payne, Chesterfield’s Acting Accounts Payable (AP) Manager.

“It’s made the biggest difference you could imagine. AP spends a lot of time going back to look at invoices for auditors, our own research or for other departments. It’s made our lives so much easier because we can access the invoices from our PCs–we don’t have to spend hours searching in the file room.”

Laserfiche has made Chesterfield’s HR team’s lives easier, too. Jeannie Harper, Chief of Administrative Services, loves Laserfiche’s search capability. And it’s not just a matter of time saved.

Harper uses Laserfiche when she looks into a personnel situation. “Our HR system is good, but it’s easier for me to get the information I need from Laserfiche. I can look at the personnel action form to see the signatures and the notes I made. All those supporting documents aren’t in the HR system.”

It’s hard to imagine tampering with such success, especially since the HR department had built into Laserfiche the complex security model it had labored to create on paper. HR staff relied on Laserfiche’s solid template fields and strict auditing to allow appropriate access to users.

A Virginia Historic Landmark, Magnolia Grange is a Federal-style plantation built in 1822.

But in 2005, they had to address an important component of records management: the retention cycle. That’s when Wells supervised the installation of RME, integrating the program with the county’s existing records management model.

Changing the way the county managed records was an ambitious project. Creating a new folder structure to serve new records-management needs would change everyday procedures, and meshing a new system with the established security structure seemed like an insurmountable challenge.

Chesterfield County found that combining RME with Workflow™ created an ideal solution. Staff used RME to manage the records retention schedule, assigning access restrictions and creating shared folders to replicate the existing security structure. Using Workflow, they then copied records to the shared folders.

The first step in migrating to the new system was to recode the application that created a template for empty records. Chesterfield’s IT department then created an application to copy existing records into RME using the new template. Finally, the team planned out a records series in RME.

To implement the process, the scanning staff froze all records additions and changes. The conversion application created and renamed files and copied the template data from the old system. Wells says that in the future, staff will develop techniques to flag new documents rather than freezing additions and changes.

Taking the turn at Richmond International Speedway.

Huge as the task seemed, after 30 days, staff had successfully migrated most of the records. Department liaisons and HR personnel who had used the old system barely noticed the interface had changed. And Chesterfield’s Scanning Coordinator Nancy Pearse has noticed an improvement in security.

“Nothing can be added or taken away—Laserfiche keeps everything where it’s supposed to be.” She especially appreciates the time saved with the automated retention schedule, because previously, she had to manually delete records.

Routing documents with Workflow has been an added benefit for Pearse. “We always know where documents are in the approval process. The e-mail piece has also been very useful for us—if someone needs a document, I can just e-mail it directly from Laserfiche.”

County employees can donate their leave time to seriously ill coworkers or those with illness in their families. Laserfiche Workflow has put an end to scrambling to meet deadlines for the leave donation program.

“HR scans the donation forms in, and the status field triggers the workflow,” says Jeannie Harper. “When payroll deducts the leave from the proper party and changes the status, Laserfiche sends a notification and moves the document to the appropriate folder, based on the fiscal year. It’s great because we typically get requests right at the deadline—with a paper system, we might not be able to make it.”

Harper expects retention schedules to change again. As will technology, no doubt. But Chesterfield County will be ready. Laserfiche Administrator Wells looks forward to more integrations in the future. And he’s off to a good start.

He points to the integration of AP with the overall accounting system as a particular success. Staff barcodes invoices and inputs the codes into the mainframe. When the invoices are scanned in, a batch job populates the template fields and moves the invoices to the proper location.

Wells has also integrated Laserfiche with the county planning department’s GIS system. When Planning installed Laserfiche, its GIS system already included hard links for each land parcel to PDF files on a shared network. “Our reseller and our engineering department devised a program that changes all those links to WebLink™ search links. Now, users click on a parcel to bring up a WebLink window with all the pertinent information.”

In the future, Wells envisions providing citizens with Web access to the most frequently requested documents. Currently, the county is adding more storage to prepare for future use of drive space. When asked how he measures the county’s success with Laserfiche, he asks, “You mean, other than the number of departments clamoring to be put on the system?” Kevin Payne puts it this way: “I would definitely say that this has been the best enhancement to any AP process that we’ve done—I’ve been here 5 years, but I’ve heard the same thing from people who have been here for 20 years. It’s a great product.”

Wells can look forward to even more success with the release of Laserfiche 8™. “All the enhancements coming in Laserfiche 8—multi-value template fields, the Recycle Bin, the new Workflow interface—will greatly improve our existing work processes. I can’t wait to beta-test it.”

Working with R&S Integrated, a Laserfiche reseller based in Lakeland, Florida, JWB installed Laserfiche to manage and store accounting and personnel records, as well as documentation related to board meetings. The new system helps staff locate information far more quickly and easily than in the past, as well as reclaim office space previously used to store paper.

As with most Laserfiche installations, staff kept finding innovative ways to use the new system to improve their job performance. But when JWB decided to use Laserfiche to reinvent the way social services agencies apply for board-distributed funds, R&S realized that it wasn’t just dealing with paperwork anymore. Instead, it was helping these agencies evaluate—and improve—the services they provide to disabled people, single mothers and disadvantaged children.

“It’s a great public service for us to help JWB streamline the application process the agencies follow,” says Robert Porter of R&S. “We feel good about helping those agencies—which are dedicated to helping needy families—eliminate time-consuming paperwork.”

JWB feels good about the job Laserfiche is doing, too. File boxes filled with documents, spreadsheets, photos and hand-written notes have been converted into easily-searchable PDF files, which are linked to JWB’s Website via a customized, password-protected intranet connection developed by R&S. Using this technology, the agencies can instantly access and complete numerous checklists and forms online, and can easily attach supporting documentation when needed. Once complete, the forms are archived in Laserfiche.

JWB also uses Laserfiche to manage its library of documents related to each agency’s service mission. Using Web Access™, the agencies can retrieve these documents, as well as add new documents to the library.

Around sixty social services agencies, from the YWCA to Big Brothers Big Sisters, depend on the JWB and its $52 million annual budget to fund their social services initiatives. However, with social services funds in short supply, JWB must ensure that taxpayers’ money is spent wisely, and that’s where one of JWB’s most important innovations comes into play.

JWB’s online Agency Self-Study Efficacy Tool (ASSET) is a collection of nineteen groups of questionnaires, application forms and documentation request forms agencies must complete every three years. “It’s more than an application process,” explains Pat Gehant, JWB’s director of IT. “It’s a process we use to strengthen an agency, in the sense that ASSET allows the agency to learn how effectively it’s doing its job.”

ASSET is a simple name for a complex series of forms agencies must complete to demonstrate the effectiveness of their service delivery. Now that most of the agencies complete this process online, however, it’s become significantly easier. Even for small agencies, the application process was previously quite lengthy and generated boxes of documentation, from spreadsheets and Microsoft^® Word^® files to photos and facsimiles. For larger agencies, such as the YWCA, completing the process took months and generated so much paperwork that hand trucks were necessary to transport it.

All of this paperwork was then hand-delivered to JWB reviewers, who examined files page-by-page to make sure they were complete. To verify the accuracy of the information the agencies provided, the reviewers had to transport the paper files back into the field to check them against the agency’s actual facilities. Because agencies were required to submit up to six copies of each document for different reviewers to examine, JWB provided each agency with $1500 to cover duplication costs.

“The agencies no longer have to make multiple copies of documents, which involved hours—or even days—of photocopying documents and organizing them in binders,” says Gehant. “Then, we’d have to go to the agency’s headquarters and perform a site assessment while carrying around all that paper. We’d literally get aches and pains from doing it. Now, we receive the documents electronically, and we can easily transfer them to CD and hand it to the reviewers. The reviewers take their laptops to the site and have instant access to the documents on their computer screens.”

Pinellas County’s Howard Park consists of 155 acres overlooking the Gulf of Mexico.

ASSET may sound relatively straightforward now that it’s up and running, but it took considerable ingenuity to develop. R&S first used one of its own software products, called OpusDoc^®, to convert scanned images of the ASSET forms into a single, compound document. R&S then applied SmartForms^® technology to the new file to make it easier for agencies to access it online.

The beauty of this system, as R&S’s Porter explains, lies in the fact that different types of documentation are accessible in a single PDF file: “Because Word documents, Excel^® spreadsheets and image files are in the same PDF, agencies no longer have to manage pages and pages of separate forms.”

Ambitious as the integration process may sound, the finished product is an elegant system that has eliminated the hours previously spent filling out forms by hand, copying information from one document to another, making photocopies and transporting documents from one location to another. The project has also provided R&S with a flexible middleware program that can be used again if another client wants to automate collaborative business processes in a similar way.

“Although the project was only half the size of some of the projects we’ve worked on, it was equally challenging, given the systems we had to bring together,” Porter says. “But now that we’ve built it, we can use it in other installations as well.” In fact, Porter believes that the JWB project represents the type of integration that’s becoming increasingly common as clients discover more innovative ways to use their Laserfiche systems.

Pinellas County offers an array of watersport activities.

There are other advantages to using ASSET and the custom programming that supports it, both Gehant and Porter agree. The agencies now have an online application portfolio that other government offices and funding sources can review. For example, the Pinellas County License Board can refer to ASSET when certifying childcare facilities funded by JWB. The agencies can also upload extensive information about their services to the JWB Website for increased exposure. “These charitable agencies can use the JWB Website as their own. It’s a helping hand JWB extends to the agencies, and more and more are taking advantage of it,” Porter notes.

It may seem surprising that agencies praise a system that’s ultimately used to evaluate their performance, yet many do. The YWCA of Tampa Bay, for example, derives a significant amount of its annual budget from JWB funding. Previously, when the YWCA had to complete the application process, staff had to assemble multiple boxes of documents. Thanks to ASSET, those boxes have been replaced by a single CD, making the process far quicker and easier.

“ASSET is a significant improvement over all that paperwork,” says Patti Bacha, the YWCA’s director of human resources and operations. “ASSET helps us make sure we deliver quality service to the people we are supposed to be serving. As a result, JWB is helping people more effectively.”

They never knew it could help them fight crime.

But then, discovery has played as big a role as document management in an installation that has gradually grown to include every law enforcement agency in the county.

Four years ago SLO County won a $350,000 state grant to install document imaging software that would let its law enforcement agencies share some of their paperwork with the DA’s office electronically.

The idea was there would be no more carrying criminal rap sheets, coroner’s reports and such from all corners of the county to the DA’s office in the City of San Luis Obispo near the coast.

But, as investigators with the DA’s office have worked with Laserfiche, they’ve learned there’s a lot more to this software than saving on transportation costs.

“The importance of Laserfiche to our investigators is in using old reports and investigation records preserved by Laserfiche,” said Stephen Brown, the chief deputy district attorney for SLO County. “With Laserfiche we can reconstruct a person’s criminal history, their patterns of behavior, their associates and their present whereabouts.”

Laserfiche also makes it easier to observe and enforce the state’s three-strikes law, Brown said. And, of course, it saves lots of time and money. Many documents are now delivered to the DA’s office by Internet, not interstate.

“It certainly saves a lot of time that was spent driving the reports down here,” said Brown. “Or if a person is in custody, and they have to be arraigned within two days of the arrest, it can help those officers involved with transmitting the data to us more promptly.”

As the arguments for using Laserfiche started to pile up, other law enforcement agencies in SLO County began lining up. Arroyo Grande Police Department, the first to install it, served as the lead agency, followed by the Sheriff’s Office.

Presently, Laserfiche serves dozens of staff and officers in the Sheriff’s Office, Probation Court, Superior Court and the police departments from Arroyo Grande, Atascadero, Grover Beach, Morro Bay, Paso Robles and Pismo Beach. All send arrest and investigation reports to Brown’s office.

Of the 16,000 cases the DA’s office processes annually, about 15 percent are now transferred electronically via Laserfiche, Brown said. That number is expected to go much higher as those police departments are just now discovering new ways to manage old records using Laserfiche.

When the Paso Robles Police Department was building a new station, Laserfiche was a huge help in the transfer and storage of a mountain of paperwork into the new digs, according to Melissa Garcia, Records Clerk for the PRPD.

Various offices in the department also took advantage of the move to back up files on CDs. Department security anxieties over computerizing so many documents quickly dissolved after discovering built-in Laserfiche security access features configured to keep prying eyes out.

Garcia said recent Laserfiche upgrades have made the system work even more smoothly. Thanks to Laserfiche’s Quick Fields capture module, documents can now be stored at the push of a button without typing in filing information first.

“Now it’s pretty much a pass over the scanner and we’re done,” Garcia said. “Laserfiche saves us tons of time and man-hours with just the few minutes it takes to scan these documents. We’re not going home any earlier, we’re just doing more work in a day.”

And like Brown’s office, Paso Robles is now discovering there’s more to Laserfiche than records management.

In the past, officers looking for prior arrest records and such on detainees depended on RMS, a nationwide records management system for police arrest records. But as Paso Robles rebuilds its records room, it’s discovering that Laserfiche offers its officers a lot more than RMS.

“RMS doesn’t have photos, witness statements or hand-written notes,” Garcia said. “The documents we scan into Laserfiche do.”

Dan Matich, supervisor for the adult division of the SLO Probation Office, said his department was one of the last to install the system. Right now they use the document storage device to solve records storage space issues. Matich estimates 3,000 to 4,000 cases have been scanned in so far.

The next step is to be able to share those records with other county law enforcement agencies including Brown’s office. And Like Brown, Matich expects his office will find Laserfiche is more than just document storage software.

“We talked about someday going totally paperless with Laserfiche, but we haven’t gotten there yet,” Matich said. “But I know we can use Laserfiche for a lot more than just document storage.”

Yet there it was, the stairwell paper shuffle, an extra daily challenge for the staff of Washington state’s Cowlitz County Jail.

It worked something like this. Twenty five inmates squeezed into the jail’s video hearing room on the third floor, the District Court judge receiving their closed circuit televised testimony on the second floor and corrections officer running up and down between the two, collecting the signatures to make it all official.

“Inmates in various states of sobriety and cooperation would wait an hour sometimes two as the paperwork came and went. It was fun”, says Corrections Officer Dave Fundingsland, “ to sit and watch the bad vibes fester as the wheels of justice worked their way through the stairwells.”

“The inmates tend to get restless,” said the 15-year jail veteran, noting that there are sometimes volatile combinations of people in that hearing room. “I remember one time we had a husband and wife in there at the same time for domestic violence assault.”

That was before they started using Laserfiche. The new software, installed because a cumbersome system was about to approach impossible with the jail’s relocation across the street, allows defendants to simply sign an electronic pad in the video hearing room. No more stairs.

Everything from release forms, to sentences, to no-contact orders are now dealt with in real time, with all the pertinent info and background available to everyone on both ends.

“Now,” said Fundingsland, “they’re in that room for maybe 15, 20 minutes.”

On the other side of the street, District Court administrator Dee Wirkkala says simply, “I can’t imagine what it would have been like if we hadn’t done this – we would have had a real nightmare.”

Dee Wakkala

“In fact,” she says,” the success has led to one downside of Laserfiche’s installation: “We’re never finished.”

“We were supposed to start out with a limited scope,” Wirkkala said, “and it’s working so well we keep adding more and more and more to it.”

Indeed, thanks to cooperative creative work of Cowlitz IT ace Patty Kero and Laserfiche vendor VP Consulting, the software has brought into sight a once unthinkable goal: An almost entirely paper-free courthouse.

“You could feel that something extra good was going to happen from the start,” said VP VAR Vicki Pattle, a Laserfiche reseller since 1993. “In the end, the programmer, Patty Kero, broke new ground in using Laserfiche.”

Along with the jail system installation, Kero wrote a program for the small claims court that Wirkkala insists is responsible for “a huge efficiency upgrade” since its arrival in March.

When someone comes in with a new small claims case — lawyer-free lawsuits of less than $4,000 from the five surrounding towns covered by Cowlitz County District Court – it’s paperless from the start.

“When the original file comes in, we use Laserfiche – we don’t build a file, we don’t save paper,” said Wirkkala, noting the obvious advantage over traditional filing.

“We had (an old paper file) this morning that got misfiled and we probably spent three hours trying to find this physical file, where if it had been (in Laserfiche) we wouldn’t have had to look for it.”

With cases that come in now, any of the court’s 16 staffers can instantly access the entire file without having to worry about who has it or where it needs to be. That includes the judge, who links to Laserfiche through a monitor right on the bench.

But as important as the software itself, according to Kero, has been its ability to adapt to the specific needs of its users. They were able move along cautiously in the jail and courthouse, she said, making minor adjustments as any issues arose.

“We did take it slow,” said Kero, explaining that “the software really evolved with them.”

Fundingsland, who operates the system at the jail, calls it “pretty much flawless.”

When we first started we had to make changes here and there,” he said. “We called (Kero) and it was done.”

The success has bred more plans. Soon, the judge will be able to sign an electronic pad to finalize, record and print – for parties to take with them — his decisions in one step.

And it’s hoped that by the middle of next year, defendant’s lawyers will be able to access Laserfiche via the Internet and handle their client’s in-court needs electronically.

Combine that with the notion of scanning and eliminating the tens of thousands of old files stored in cabinets, and Wirkkala says it’s whole new world. Consider that last year alone there were 26,427 cases filed, and each file averages roughly 20 pieces of paper.

“Then we do have some that are 6 inches thick,” she said.

All of it, argues Kero, will be safer when the work is done. There is password security for all files and disc back-ups stored off site.

“In a lot of ways it’s more secure than if you had a paper copy,” she said. “What if there’s a fire or a flood or an earthquake? If something happens, a document could be gone forever with no way to protect them.”

The advancement, however, leads to yet another nice-to-have problem: How to use the newly vacated space.

“There’s a whole section where we keep small claims, and now there’s nothing there,” said Wirkkala. “Every once in a while I’ll walk up there to pull a file and say, ‘Oh, wait a minute…’ Just to get rid of even half of this stuff would be amazing.”

The Department opted for Laserfiche®-a document imaging software package designed by Compulink Management Center of Long Beach, California-and a high speed Ricoh scanner, all purchased from VP Consulting, Inc., of Eugene, Oregon. Almost immediately after the purchase order was approved, Mother Nature proved it was none too early: the worst rains in decades sent the Willamette River surging over its banks. Raw sewage threatened to back up into the County’s basement records room and the lowest two shelves were in danger of being inundated.

Eight volunteer deputies worked frantically to box up records and carry them upstairs. “Our offices were filled with boxes of paper,” Dane said. “It was hampering our work.”

Later, as the waters receded, the County donated the old jail records to a local museum and changed its rules on retention of all records. “We used to keep everything forever,” said Dane. “Now we follow the state requirements-2 years for misdemeanors, 7 years for felonies, and ‘forever’ only for homicides and unattended deaths.” (According to Dane, Oregon law defines “forever” as 100 years.) They also decided to broaden their implementation of Laserfiche to include current documents and active cases. Said Dane, “Initially, it was just to be for archiving, a replacement for filing cabinets. But as we saw the system demonstrated, we realized how much more we could do and our expectations changed. Imaging is not just a way to archive stuff, it’s also a way to share it!”

Dane reviewed two other systems before settling on Laserfiche. “The first was slick, but it cost $19,000 for each workstation, without any networking, and the proprietary hardware would just be a big paperweight when we weren’t using it. The Laserfiche system uses standard PC’s and our existing Novell network.” The second system was from the vendor of the County’s video booking system. “It was very clunky,” said Dane. “The interface just wasn’t intuitive.”

Finally Dane visited Oregon State University, which had picked Laserfiche in 1993 after a three-year search. “The librarian, Ramesh Krishnamurthy, told me that anybody can sell an imaging system, but Compulink was tops for a solid, stable network imaging system. Rather than conduct our own three-year search, we took his advice and bought Laserfiche.”

After scanning in the current records, the County plans to scan in all incident reports from 1994 and 1995, and then make the system available to the District Attorney, Juvenile Authority, and Roads Department via the County’s WAN (Wide-Area Network). Eventually all 15 County Departments will archive and share their records using Laserfiche. Continued Dane: “We’re even considering making the scanned documents available to the City of Corvallis because they share our network. With Laserfiche, we’ll be sharing files using faxing and our network instead of using photocopying and inter-office mail.”

There wasn’t room for one more box of records. About 21 years after the Eaton County Courthouse was built, it had run out of storage space.

The county’s Manager of Information Services, Robert Sobie, decided it was time for the record-keeping revolution he’d been planning. “I have been extremely fond of imaging technology for a number of years.” he said.

Laserfiche Document Imaging, that is.

“Our paper records are the lifeline of what we do,” Sobie said recently. “You cannot process a court case unless you have a case file. You can’t construct a building unless you have a building permit. We need all that information; we just have to store it differently today than we’ve been doing over the past 100 years.”

He consulted Jennifer Tysse, of Matrix Imaging, in nearby Southfield, and together they worked out a system that included a 10-user version of Laserfiche operating on the county’s Novell network.

After the system was installed, it was time to run the old paper files through a scanner, converting their data from words, numbers and drawings on paper to the electronic language of computers. That now is being done in-house by a temporary employee, who “knew very little about computers and nothing about document imaging,” Sobie said.

“But it took us only a day to teach her what to do,” Sobie said. “That’s how user-friendly Laserfiche is.”

The first records being scanned into the system are those of the Construction Codes Department–applications and building permits. In mid-November, the data was being scanned into computer hard drives, but equipment was already on order to switch over to a high-capacity magneto-optical system–compact disks which, unlike the ordinary CD-ROM, can be written over many times.

Next to be scanned in are the county court records, and sheriff’s department records–all the data and photographs of people charged with crimes.

Ultimately, said Sobie, they plan to extend the system to the Registrar of Deeds office. “We’ve been supplying the title companies with microfilm copies of deeds and mortgages after they’re filed,” he said. “We won’t do that any more: we’ll supply them with a week or a month of land-record images on a compact disk that will have Laserfiche software on it as well as the images. The title companies are very excited about that–but what they’re going to like even better–and we’re going to give it to them–is dial-in access to the county network. They’re going to be able to sit in their offices and see those images on our system as quickly as we scan them in.

“I tell you, we’re on the cusp of a records revolution.”

As a former prosecutor, I believe that government functions best when it operates in the public eye,” Brock explains. “At the same time, as a CPA, I want to keep costs down. Thanks to technological advances that allow us to put up enormous amounts of information quickly and inexpensively, we can now do both.”

Currently, Brock’s site provides access to reports on the actions of the Collier County Board of County Commissioners since 1991. The next major step is to add public records from the court itself. “Eventually, people will have access to everything short of the trial strategies for the criminal and civil cases that we are handling at that time,” Brock says.

The repository of records on Brock’s site is powered by Laserfiche WebLink®, a scan-to-the-Web publishing system capable of providing searchable access to millions of pages of documents. Using this product, Board of County Commissioners information becomes available as soon as it is scanned into an Internet-connected database. The process eliminates the need for coding, file conversion, special plug-ins or software in order to view the document. For example, it would take several years for an experienced Webmaster to put 80,000 pages of information on the Internet using HTML coding, the current standard for the vast majority of Internet pages. Brock’s staff was able to create the initial database for its Web site in less than ten hours.

“Using this approach, we can provide instantaneous access to huge amounts of information very inexpensively, especially now that the initial ’supersizing’ of the Web site is finished,” says Brock. “In terms of human resources saved, the system has already paid for itself.”

The office of the Collier County Clerk of Courts is one of the first local government agencies anywhere to commit to putting all its public records on the Internet. Others making similar commitments include the City of Bakersfield, CA; Deschutes and Benton counties in Oregon; and a regional planning council in Brazil. There are more than 30 additional local government agencies in various stages of using Laserfiche WebLink to turn the Internet into a searchable library for their public records. Lakeland, FL-based R&S Integrated Products and Services, Inc., handled the Collier County installation. The repository can be found at http://www.clerk.collier.fl.us/weblink/.