Maine’s state motto is “The Way Life Should Be,” and the City of Saco’s could well be “The Way Laserfiche Should Be.” Thanks to a commitment to user education and establishing an in-house Laserfiche administrator, city employees in every department have embraced an ecological and economical paradigm shift in how the city does business and offers services.

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

So why has Saco been so successful? For starters, when City Administrator Rick Michaud and Saco’s IT staff looked into document management three years ago, they didn’t have a problem, they had a plan.
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To be honest, the City of Albany, OR, hadn’t really been maximizing Laserfiche when its new Finance Director wanted to do away with using it altogether five years ago.

The city had installed Laserfiche in its Finance Department in 1998 as a virtual file cabinet. “Between 1999-2003 we were only scanning a few thousand documents a month and it was limited to just the Finance department,” admits Network Administrator and Laserfiche Luminary Allen Pilgrim. By 2004, Laserfiche storage totaled just ten volumes of 4.6GB each. A significant number, but apparently not significant enough for one new city administrator.
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Since implementing Laserfiche in 2007, Collin County, TX, home to the Dallas/Fort Worth area’s fastest-growing northeast suburbs, has enjoyed enterprise-wide success automating and integrating its business processes. But as Records Manager Margaret Anderson points out, it’s been as a direct result of equally enterprise-wide pre-planning working with the county’s myriad departments.

The County saw its population increase nearly 50%—from nearly 500,000 in 2000 to 725,000 by 2007—straining the county’s infrastructure. As Anderson puts it, “The exponential growth rate of our county is reflected in the increased demand for essential county services.” The governing body of the county, the Commissioners Court, then issued a strategic direction to improve efficiency and customer service. “This caused us to look at an enterprise solution to managing our records with emphasis on migrating to electronic records,” she explains. “We had to reduce our paper and microfilm records volume.”
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Win-win situations are not good enough for information technology staff in Marshall, part of Minnesota’s Lyon County. They’ve got to have win-win, win-win.

That’s because the Marshall school district, its city hall, municipal utility department and the Lyon County government all have built their IT infrastructures around Laserfiche. So when one part of the quartet undertakes improvements to Laserfiche, everybody benefits—and it seems that the improvements aren’t stopping any time soon.

“That’s the thing about Laserfiche,” says Todd Pickthorn, an IT expert with the Marshall School District. “Once you’ve completed one project with Laserfiche, your eyes open up to the new projects that are possible. That’s been the case with all the agencies we’re working with. When one makes an improvement, everybody reaps the rewards.”
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In Bakersfield, CA, a town known for its agriculture, manufacturing and petroleum extraction and refining is now known for something different: its innovative technology.

As the fastest-growing city in the United States with a population of over 250,000, Bakersfield was experiencing an explosion of records. “We wanted a document management system to store public documents in a secure, easily searchable manner,” says IT Director Bob Trammell. “We chose Laserfiche because of its pricing and how easy it was to search for and retrieve documents.”

“I had already installed Laserfiche in a city where I was previously employed, so I was very familiar with it,” Trammell adds. “That was eleven years ago, and today all 19 departments in the city, as well as thousands of citizens, use Laserfiche.”
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Charlottesville, VA is consistently voted one of America’s best cities to live, marked as it is by its deep history (birthplace of three U.S. presidents) and its college-town charm (home to the University of Virginia). But when it came to records management, Charlottesville’s paper history held little charm for the city staff left dealing with its outdated and overgrown filing system.

“Life before Laserfiche was full of frustration,” remembers Rosalind Collins, Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue and Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.
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For Mohave County, AZ, the third time was the charm for the county’s Records Manager to successfully implement Laserfiche enterprise-wide.

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.
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Compared to other cities in Nevada, Boulder City is something of an anomaly. Unlike nearby Las Vegas and the rest of Henderson County, BC is relatively quaint, with a population of just 15,000.

“We’re close to Las Vegas, we’re close to the Hoover Dam, but we’re surrounded by 200 miles of land. It’s like a buffer around us,” explains City Clerk Pamella Malmstrom. “Clark County has been one the fastest growing counties in the country. We’ve taken steps to not grow so rapidly.”

But even as modest Boulder City seems buffered from the noisy neon of its neighbors, it still faced the same information management concerns as every other city in the state. Especially since late 2007, when the state legislature passed a resolution mandating that all government agencies in Nevada be able to honor requests for public records within five working days. Full story »

Nestled along the Sheep River Valley in the heart of the Alberta Foothills, the town of Okotoks, AB, is the second-fastest growing community in Canada, with a 46 percent growth rate since 2001.

According to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Okotoks “can fairly call itself the greenest community in Canada, maybe the world,” as it is one of the first municipalities to establish growth targets balancing infrastructure development and environmental conservation. And true to its motto of “Historic Past, Sustainable Future,” Okotoks has received national and international recognition for its environmental initiatives, so it’s no surprise they turned to Laserfiche to reduce paper consumption. Full story »

Palm tree-shaped islands. The world’s tallest building. An indoor ski resort. In the past 30 years, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, has quickly blossomed from a regional business center to a global destination. But with 30 years of development comes 30 years of paperwork to manage—which is why Dubai chose a scalable, easy-to-implement Laserfiche solution to convert all of the city’s paper into digital format. Now, an extensive back-file conversion project is under way, with Laserfiche poised to take over day-forward scanning as well. Full story »

In many cities, staff have to impose on the city clerk’s office whenever they need to consult a report, contract or other municipal document. But thanks to Laserfiche, staff throughout the City of Goodyear, AZ, can instantly access these items online, which helps them work more efficiently—and frees staff in the clerk’s office to spend more time helping the public.

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With over 300,000 residents, Riverside, CA, is already one of California’s largest cities, and with each new tally on the census taker’s clipboard comes more information for city staff to manage. So it’s only logical that Riverside is expanding its Laserfiche enterprise content management system to keep pace. Thanks to the drive of the city clerk, what began as a means for one department to find information more quickly has now become the technology platform for citywide business process improvements, cost savings and better public service. Full story »

As the winner of a 2007 InfoWorld 100 Award for IT innovation, Gaston County, NC, is a shining example of the way technology can help move government forward. So when it came time to implement a digital document management solution, it’s no surprise that CIO Brandon Jackson sought the system that could best promote broader-ranging citizen services. As part of the award-winning initiative, a rapidly-growing Laserfiche® system now provides solid technological support for Gaston County’s service mission. Full story »

The City of Niagara Falls, ON, implemented Laserfiche^® in 2001 to provide all departments with a central location to store and manage information. Over the years, each department had developed its own method for organizing files, and the city chose Laserfiche primarily because its flexible folder structure and unified metadata model would accommodate these various filing systems. Full story »

Most people know Gilroy, California, as the “Garlic Capital of the World.” But city staff in this agricultural epicenter are creating a slightly more technology-focused atmosphere. Thanks to some IT ingenuity—and an integration between Laserfiche® and other line-of-business applications—Gilroy is paving the way for other governments to adopt more citizen-oriented business processes. Full story »