• Colorado Division of Forestry.
• Colorado Division of Parks and Wildlife.
• Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining, and Safety.
• Colorado Division of Water Resources.
• Colorado Geological Survey.
• Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC).
• Colorado State Land Board.
• Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB).

According to Susan Lesovsky, Application Support Manager for the CWCB, the DNR purchased a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system in 2005 to replace a legacy IBM system that lacked an out-of-the box Web interface, optical character recognition (OCR) functionality and the ability to automate business processes. “Our old system was pretty much limited to search-and-retrieval,” she explains.

She notes that a top priority for implementing Laserfiche was making it easier for citizens to stay informed about government activities. “Ultimately, our customer is the public, and our success is measured on how we provide and process information for them,” Lesovsky says.

To that end, the DNR upgraded to Laserfiche Rio in 2009. According to Lesovsky, “Laserfiche Rio has allowed us to increase the transparency of information to the public, and it’s done it in such a way that we don’t have to worry about connections or cost.”

In particular, she describes the benefits of upgrading to Laserfiche Rio as:

• Greater public access to information through the WebLink Public Portal, which provides unlimited connections.
• Scalability through unlimited servers and volume discounts on user licenses to accommodate future growth.
• The bundled functionality of Web Access and Workflow.

Laserfiche Rio Enables Citizens to Cut through Red Tape

Lesovsky notes that Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper recently called for every department in state government to reduce red tape. Good government, he says, is characterized by “efficiency, effectiveness and elegance.”

“As one of only two recommended content management systems for the state, Laserfiche epitomizes all three E’s,” Lesovsky says.

She explains how easy it is for citizens to access documents such as the CWCB’s meeting documents:

• The current year’s materials are available on the Board’s Website in a table that provides direct links to PDFs stored in Laserfiche.
• Archived materials are accessible through a custom search box (created using the WebLink Designer) on the lower right side of same page or through this link.
• The custom search box is limited to three fields (title, date range and document type) to streamline access and reduce user confusion. (Custom search components have been included throughout the CWCB’s Website to help direct the public’s search for Board-related documents.)

Colorado’s Decision Support Systems Website also includes custom search boxes throughout its Website, such as the one at the top of this page that searches according to document type and a few other parameters, while a set of “Google-like” search results based on document type displays below thanks to an encoded URL string.

“We used the WebLink Designer to create custom searches because we noticed that our users would get overwhelmed when presented with a long list of templates and fields,” says Lesovsky. “Each custom search focuses on a particular program area or topic and uses a limited set of search criteria within the associated template.”

Quick, easy and efficient searches support Hickenlooper’s goal of driving the “three E’s” into government operations. Lesovsky explains, “In the past, people had to come to our offices to request information. Laserfiche WebLink provides a simple and elegant way for the public to get immediate access to the information they need whenever they need it.”

Integrations Make ECM “Mission-Critical”

By integrating Laserfiche WebLink with other software applications, the DNR has been able to make information even more accessible. For example, by integrating Laserfiche with ESRI ArcGIS, staff can click on a stream and retrieve associated court documents, while public users can quickly access information associated with flooding and flood hazards in the state.

To see the public-facing integration in action:

• Visit Colorado’s Flood Decision Support System page.
• Click on the Flood DSS Map Viewer.
• Agree to the disclaimer.
• Click the Documents tab in the top menu.
• Enter your search criteria in the pop-up window. For example, select:
  • Group: Historical Flooding.
  • Document: Historical flood photographs.
  • Type: Photographs.
• Hit the search button.
• A new window displays the results (produced on-the-fly by an encoded URL string) in a grid format.

It’s the integrations with applications like ESRI ArcGIS that make Laserfiche “mission-critical.” According to Lesovsky, “When you integrate Laserfiche with business-specific systems, you embed it into your existing workflow processes and it becomes integral to how you operate.”

ECM Enables Electronic Forms Processing

Laserfiche Rio has been a particularly effective ECM solution for the DNR because different divisions can configure it to meet their unique needs. For example, the Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) uses Laserfiche to enable an eForm application that provides an interface for oil and gas operators to enter and submit permit forms and supporting documents. There are currently six active forms and three in development.

According to Ken Robertson, Application Developer for the COGCC, “Uploaded files are stored in our production Web server. Once the operators submit the form to our internal server, we export the attachments to Laserfiche.”

He explains that the public can view the files directly from the production Web server or wait until the files are imported to Laserfiche and use WebLink to access them. Furthermore, he outlines how the COGCC has used the Laserfiche SDK to create customized Laserfiche scripts and programs.

Robertson says, “For those attachments still sitting in our production Web server, we created a Windows service to check queued files in the Web server every 15 minutes and use the Laserfiche Toolkit [SDK] for .NET to import files to the Laserfiche repository server. In the meantime, we also collect the Laserfiche reference numbers in our attachment table so that system (eForm) can provide a WebLink download page for users to view the attachments.”

He notes that there is a separate application that allows oil and gas operators to upload well logs, which are imported into Laserfiche using Laserfiche Import Agent, a tool that captures and processes electronic documents. Scanning staff members use Laserfiche Quick Fields to index other types of electronic documents.

The biggest benefit of processing permits and well logs with Laserfiche is time. Robertson says, “We used to shuffle files from one person to another until they were approved, and then we scanned everything into the system. Having the operators upload their attachments to their documents saves an average of 15 minutes of scanning and indexing time for our staff, not to mention the time saved on data entry.”

He goes on to explain that having everything available electronically at the beginning of the process allows multiple people to work on the same forms simultaneously, further reducing processing time.

“Not only do we save time,” Robertson says, “but the approval process is now more transparent for the public.”

Lesovsky adds, “Laserfiche is powerful, flexible and easy to work with. Even though all our divisions use the same system, we can all use it a little differently.”

Looking Ahead

Lesovsky is particularly excited to use Laserfiche to harvest data across organizations. She explains that the CWCB has already conducted a feasibility study and has a grant in place to make it happen.

“Colorado State University has an ECM solution other than Laserfiche but a healthy collection of water information. The Colorado Water Resources Development & Power Authority and the Colorado River Water Conservation District currently use Laserfiche, with repositories of useful water documents. By hooking our systems together and using common metadata, we’ll be able to search for information across all four entities and gain a more complete picture of accessible water information in the state.”

She says that the DNR is also working on integrating Laserfiche and SharePoint. “Most of our divisions use SharePoint for their external Websites. Right now, people have to conduct separate searches if they want to find content stored in both Laserfiche and SharePoint. What we’re looking to do is enable searches that return results from both systems at the same time.”

All in all, she says, “Laserfiche Rio is a great tool. The bottleneck now is just finding the time to make it do everything we want it to do.”

Although both Arkansas’ supreme court and court of appeals have recently begun broadcasting—and archiving—live oral arguments on their Website, it is the courts’ use of enterprise content management (ECM) technology that has caught the Supreme Court’s eye.

“We’d had a document imaging system in place for several years, but it hadn’t been used much,” says Frederick. “Only a few techs even knew how to access it, and the search and retrieval capability for records wasn’t particularly useful. We had to ask ourselves, ‘Why scan anything if you can’t use the system?’”

He continues, “Our principal selection criteria for an ECM solution included the ability to manage content, automate processes, enable easy access to records and raise visibility for the legal community and the public.”

He notes that, ultimately, it was the unlimited servers included with Laserfiche Rio that won over the courts’ IT Department. “Both courts issue opinions of high interest that are heavily accessed, so we wanted to make sure we had failovers and test servers in place to accommodate that.”

Laserfiche Enables Electronic Opinions

In 2009, Arkansas became the first state to establish electronic reporting as the official medium for appellate court opinions. Substantial cost savings resulting from the transition provided the opportunity to implement Laserfiche.

“Before that, the appellate court opinions had always been officially reported in bound volumes,” says Frederick. “However, the volumes were produced and distributed approximately four times a year, which meant there was significant lag time between issuance of an opinion and its appearance in its official format.”

With declining subscription rates, higher production costs and advancing technology, the court determined that its current method of publication was no longer acceptable. “Although court systems in general have been slow to enter the digital age, we have to remember that we work for the public, and they’re used to finding information quickly on the Internet,” explains Frederick.

“One of the driving forces that led to the implementation of Laserfiche was to provide the official version of the opinions to everyone free of cost. The substantial savings realized by terminating the bound volume method was also a considerable advantage,” he says.

Using Laserfiche WebLink, a Web portal that provides instant, read-only access to documents over the Internet, the Arkansas Supreme Court and Arkansas Court of Appeals publish their latest opinions in PDF format on their Website.

“Most court records and paper copies of opinions are retained indefinitely,” notes Frederick. “In addition, we are required by statute to keep three copies of each bound volume; the final published volume count was 375 when we made the transition. From that standpoint, the storage of electronic records is far more efficient.”

In terms of search and retrieval, “metadata is a gift,” Frederick says. The Reporter of Decisions established the courts’ file structure, templates and fields, which allow anyone to access the opinions using one or more of the following criteria:

• Date.
• Court.
• Order number.
• Justice/Judge.
• Session.
• Session term.

Current Integrations, Future Plans

After enabling live video streaming by implementing a Granicus software solution, the court integrated it with Laserfiche to enable the public and legal community to access archived video footage along with a copy of the opinion tied to the case in question. “We’ve made great efforts to become more transparent,” says Frederick. “By integrating Granicus with Laserfiche, we’ve created a comprehensive digital public record that’s accessible to anyone over the Web.”

The court is currently working on integrating Laserfiche with its court management system (CMS) so that court personnel can access documents stored in Laserfiche when they’re viewing a particular case in the CMS.

Although the courts haven’t yet taken full advantage of Laserfiche Workflow, a business process management tool included with Laserfiche Rio, they may use Workflow to route drafts of their opinions to:

• The deciding panel (court of appeals, typically three judges) for review and annotations.
• The Reporter of Decisions for editing, publication and retention.

“Flow is a big buzzword right now, so knowing that we can use Laserfiche to automate more of our processes presents tremendous possibilities,” says Frederick.

Change Management Methodology for Curing “Parchment Disorder”

“One thing I’ve noticed after working in IT across a variety of industries is that the public sector is a little more cautious when it comes to adopting new technology,” says Frederick. “Some people still get comfort in being able to touch a piece of paper, so educating and training everyone on the value of Laserfiche has been interesting.”

In terms of change management, Frederick’s philosophy is that history always denotes the future. “As we were moving to electronic publication, we focused on the input from the Reporter of Decisions and the parameters set by the supreme court. Full integration would have been more easily put in place had we also gotten input from the court about the opinion writing process upfront.”

As Frederick and his team prepare to use Laserfiche to enable attorneys to e-file briefs and other documents that make up the appellate court record, they are training the judges, judicial clerks and administrative assistants first. “The better we understand what each court needs, the more successful the transition will be,” he says.

Frederick explains that e-filing will eliminate the need for lawyers to bring 16 copies of their briefs to court. More importantly, it will allow both courts to quickly find specific pieces of information contained within those briefs, thanks to chapter and marker breaks within electronic briefs, as well as Laserfiche’s sophisticated search capabilities.

“Digitizing will lower our costs and increase our clearance rates,” says Frederick. “Training people ahead of time is a key factor for recognizing the value that Laserfiche has to offer.”

Located just outside of Los Angeles, CA, the City of Long Beach turned to technology to cut costs—and create innovative ways to improve citizen service delivery. In fact, Long Beach has been so successful at leveraging technology that it has just been named one of the top ten digital cities in the U.S. with a population of 250,000 or more by the Center for Digital Government.

“The City of Long Beach takes great pride in our use of technology to be more efficient and make City Hall more accessible and responsive to the community,” says Mayor Bob Foster.

According to Curtis Tani, Director of Technology Services, the effort to reduce costs without compromising service delivery has been three-pronged:

• Consolidate information and communication technology (ICT) services.
• Increase transparency and collaboration across the enterprise.
• Digitize processes, forms and workflow.

“The Mayor, the City Council and City staff understood the value that technology could bring the city and were open to change at the foundational level to allow Long Beach to become a technology leader,” says Tani. “They understood that the shortfalls in our budget challenged operational efficiencies and gave the Technology Services Department the freedom to lead initiatives to make Long Beach a digital community.”

IT’s Strategy: Consolidate and Standardize

Long Beach has worked hard to consolidate technology functions to create budget efficiencies while still providing enough flexibility for each department to run efficiently. “By bringing our IT staff into one office and centralizing IT oversight, we’ve been able to decrease overall staffing costs as well as the number of overlapping technology investments,” Tani explains.

For example, in 2009, Long Beach chose to replace its existing IBM FileNet system in various departments with a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system that could be used across the city. “We selected Laserfiche to create more consistency, efficiency and transparency, while saving the city many thousands of dollars in equipment and maintenance fees,” Tani says.

In fact, by implementing a single Laserfiche system, the city cut its annual ECM support costs by 50%. “Our strategy is to implement shared services to capitalize on existing funding and consolidate services,” explains Tani. “Our ECM system is just one example of this.”

Other cost-saving IT consolidation efforts include:

• A new, enterprise-wide Internet-based phone system expected to generate $165,000 in annual savings.
• Virtual servers and workstations expected to generate $100,000 in energy and hardware savings over three years.
• Cluster databases that have reduced licensing and hardware fees.

ECM and Open Government

In April 2011, the Long Beach City Council adopted an open government policy identifying transparency as a core function of local government. To that end, making information more accessible by staff and citizens alike has been a top priority.

“Long Beach is dedicated to fostering and promoting open and transparent government where everyone in our community can easily participate and be engaged,” explains Long Beach City Clerk Larry Herrera. “As one of the largest cities in California, we are committed to exploring best practices, adopting new technologies that simplify and speed up all work processes and providing a level of customer service that is unmatched.”

Herrera notes that the City Clerk’s office uses Laserfiche to streamline paperwork and processes, helping the city deliver higher service at a lower cost. “In 2002, we needed 28 people to provide the public with quick, accurate and effective answers to their questions about our community. Today, with a staff of 17, our level of customer service is better than ever before.”

Over the past year and a half, the city has spent approximately $120,000 for offsite record storage. Staff had to manually retrieve paper records to answer requests, leading to delays in service and extra costs. As more and more records are added to Laserfiche, information access is improved and storage costs are expected to decrease.

On a daily basis, the City Clerk’s office scans thousands of records into Laserfiche. Just a few of the document types available in Laserfiche include:

• City contracts.
• Campaign finance reports.
• Statements of economic interest.
• Council agendas and staff reports.
• Election ballots.
• Sample ballots.
• Voted returns.

Last spring, the city made all city contracts executed as of the first of the year available to the public through Laserfiche WebLink, a read-only public portal. With 24/7 online viewing access, city residents, contractors and employees no longer have to submit public records act (PRA) requests for these items, simplifying access and saving time for both requestors and the City Clerk’s staff.

ECM across the Enterprise

In addition to the City Clerk’s office, the Long Beach Police Department (LBPD) relies heavily on Laserfiche, using the ECM system to make information such as gang injunctions, citations, restraining orders, field interview cards and accident reports available to officers in their patrol cars.

LBPD Police Chief Jim McDonnell notes that since implementing an improved gang injunction system using Laserfiche, gang violence in Long Beach has decreased. In 2010, the first year of using the new gang injunction system, gang-related murders dropped by 53.8%. “By pairing technology with optimized policies and procedures, we’ve been able to reduce violent crime in the face of severe budget constraints. Our officers were able to spend less time on administrative tasks and reinvest this time to keeping the streets safe.”

According to Jonathan Stafford, Administrator of LBPD’s Records and Technology Division, “We were delighted when the city decided to standardize on Laserfiche. We were confident that the simplicity and flexibility of the system would enable us to be more efficient by streamlining our processes.”

Other departments that have undergone concerted efforts to digitize paper processes include:

• Financial Management.
• Human Resources.
• Development Services.

For example, in 2011 the city expanded the types of permits and licenses that can be obtained online via the Website to include garage sale permits, temporary preferential parking permits, oversized vehicle parking permits and pet licenses. Technology Services also developed an interactive Fees and Charges Web application that allows the public to easily search for fees based on department, activity or keyword.

Long Beach began streamlining its accounting processes by integrating Laserfiche with its business intelligence (BI) system. Through the integration, images of the accounts payable invoices managed in Laserfiche are available to authorized users through the BI interface. This streamlines the process of researching expenditures by eliminating the need to manually pull the physical copies of the invoices.

Long Beach City Manager Pat West explains, “Our goal is to virtualize and streamline the access and flow of records and information within the city, while ensuring security. We have been pleased with the Laserfiche system, because it easily expands and adapts to the technological and human factor needs of various departments while providing central control that is needed to ensure accountability.”

Elements of Success

According to Tani, “All the right elements were aligned for the success of our technology initiatives. City leadership, staff and citizens were onboard with the transition and willing to go above and beyond to make our efforts to centralize and standardize Long Beach’s approach to technology successful.”

In addition to the Laserfiche projects outlined above, a few of the innovative ways the citizens of Long Beach can now use technology include:

• Submitting service requests for sidewalk, graffiti and pothole repair through Long Beach’s Website or via the city’s iPhone and Android apps.
• Watching live and archived City Council meetings on the Internet, iPhone or iPad.
• Obtaining time-sensitive information such as road closures or missing persons from the police via Web, social media, live text and/or e-mail alerts.
• Using social media to access enhanced content including traffic and construction alerts, videos, news, pictures and other information.

Tani also notes that having buy-in from the community was essential to the city’s IT transformation. “We had overwhelmingly positive responses to different application launches—both from the media and end users.” He explains that the media provided ample coverage of different applications and technology tools for both public safety and general city services, and that the community was willing to try the new applications and processes and provide their feedback.

“Ultimately, increasing the dialogue between city officials and the community is what has given the city’s technology initiatives energy and poised them for success and sustainability,” he says.

As a result of the collaboration between city leadership, staff and citizens, Long Beach has used technology to position itself as a leader for the future.

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!”

At the same time, Chelsea had been experiencing what Hyland terms “a slowdown” with some departments—IT and the Inspectional Services Department (ISD) among them—facing staff reductions of up to 15–25%. For Joseph Cooney, Director of Inspectional Services, servicing the FOIA/public records requests his department received every week from real estate agents and lawyers was affecting overall service levels. “We’re down enough staff that to devote one or two people to spend a whole day finding and copying paperwork to fulfill requests was just brutal,” says Cooney.

Filling a need, launching a vision

In 2009, Chelsea IT and ISD combined efforts to go before the Chelsea City Council to propose implementing an enterprise content management (ECM) system to address the problem. “It was a pretty easy sell,” recalls Hyland. His vision was to acquire a system that eventually all departments would use, with ISD leading the way. “ISD had the immediate need and the 100-year-old documents that made the case for digitization that drove the project.”

Out of the three vendor responses to the city’s RFP, it was the Laserfiche Avante ECM system proposed by Mike McDonough of area reseller Duplitron that met all the city’s requirements the most cost-effectively. “Several cities in our area were also already using Laserfiche,” Hyland notes. Faced with his own staff reductions, Hyland was especially encouraged by the idea of using Web Access to deploy, administer and eventually expand the system. “We have a virtualized environment, so the Web-based client made the most sense for us,” Hyland says. “The less desktop installation we need, the more resourceful it is for my staff, and Web-based deployment means more users can use the system from any browser in our intranet.”

For his part, Cooney was won over when Chelsea’s Deputy City Manager, a resident of neighboring city Peabody, showed him how that city’s Laserfiche Web Portal made public information instantly searchable and available from its website. “He literally typed in his name and every document came with his name in it came up right away. I was like, ‘That’s awesome. I’m sold.’”

Searchable, viewable, sendable

In April of 2009, the city purchased a 10-user Laserfiche Avante system with Import Agent and Web Access. Initial deployment targeted the ISD’s overflowing storerooms. Cooney’s staff began scanning in the 45 filing cabinets of building, electrical, zoning, etc. inspections, ranging from bulky legal size file jackets to 3×5 cards. Laserfiche in turn made all the documents, regardless of size, age or number of pages, immediately searchable by address and viewable as a series of thumbnail images. The improvement for Cooney and his staff was immediate. “We could literally be on the phone with a request, type in the address, ask, ‘What’s your email?’ And ‘Boom, boom, boom, see ya later’—it’s sent and done,’” says Cooney. “All our inspection notices coming in now are scanned in. We’re not bogged down at all.”

Building on the ISD’s initial success, deployment has followed to the City Clerk’s office, which has merged with the Licensing office to further consolidate and optimize departmental functions and systems. Planned implementations include the city’s Law Department, which, like ISD two years ago, has nowhere to go but the attic of City Hall with its file cabinet overflow. Hyland expects more to follow. “We envisioned the system to be something more and more departments will be using,” he says, noting that this makes sense not only from an IT resource perspective, but also in terms of establishing a single point of control for governance. “Our next step would be to securely open up our information to the community.”

Turning ‘physical ROI’ into a practical framework for increased efficiency and governance

To that end, Chelsea is considering a potential upgrade to Laserfiche Rio, which would include a WebLink Public Portal, similar to the one used in neighboring Peabody. With the ISD success as a cornerstone, he says, the idea at least has a fighting chance. “The reality is that using Laserfiche has given us a ‘physical ROI’ in terms of getting rid of hundreds of filing cabinets, so we have that foundation and momentum to work from.” With modest IT resources and city staff often wearing many hats (City Clerk Deborah Clayman also serves as de facto Records Manager, for instance), a Rio upgrade would offer Chelsea bite-sized benefits of an ECM strategy (incremental deployment/licensing; increased governance; simplified records management; test server environments) without the city—or Hyland’s modest staff—biting off more than they can chew.

The possibilities are many—from simply having a single, centralized repository for documents generated by all city departments to replacing its current PDF-based online documents available with links to view documents (with appropriate redactions) right from subdirectories in the Laserfiche repository. There are also other potential projects, from image-enabling the Police Department’s CAD/RMS system through its current SharePoint deployment to linking the city’s cloud-based GIS system to the centralized Laserfiche repository. Hyland is as hopeful as he is realistic. “Right now our concept of ‘workflows’ are limited to file-sharing,” he says. “But I think when once we get all the departments online, we’ll be able talk about how that will work for us and what ECM can do project by project.”

By 2004, handling all that paper manually had become so inefficient that the ASR Office’s Property Transfers Division was five months behind in processing documents, illustrating just how antiquated, inflexible and relatively unresponsive policies and procedures had become.

This led to the implementation of a Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) system in 2006. Utilizing Quick Fields to intelligently capture and process years of tax documents previously stored on microfilm, the impact was sweeping and immediate. Using Web Access, staff could now find and complete the review process without being tethered to their desks. Property transfers that took five months to process now only took 15 days. Reviewers could also stamp documents using electronic annotations. “On average, search and retrieval time per employee used to be two hours a week. Now, it’s less than 25 minutes a week,” says Vito Filippi, Systems and Procedures Analyst.

Quick Fields finds vroom for improvements

In fact, Filippi says, applying Laserfiche to the ASR Office’s operational framework exposed just how much more room there was for improvement. “We realized our people were supporting the processes instead of the processes supporting the needs of the department,” he explains. Between budget cuts, consolidation and attrition––from over 200 staff in 2008 to what would become its present 149 employees––the loss of institutional knowledge underscored the siloed, disconnected nature of how business was done, especially as the demand for services increased.

A Laserfiche upgrade in 2009 introduced the expanded capture functionality of Quick Fields––and a closer look at the status quo. “When we moved from Laserfiche 7 to 8.1 [in 2009], the enhancements to the Search function and Quick Fields capabilities––because that’s what we use the most––really were the catalysts that got us asking ‘How can we improve our processes?’” says Filippi. “The templates and ability to run batch sessions overnight had such an impact on how we were indexing that we began to analyze what we were doing in the first place. We were able to drill down our processes to where the bottlenecks were and apply Quick Fields to assist us in finding efficiencies.”

The ensuing improvements were game changing:

1. Changes of Ownerships that took 5–15 days now take 48–72 hours. The Property Transfers division is now 90% paperless.
2. The Personal Property area of the Business division now receives and processes 20% of its 30,000 business property statements within Laserfiche.
3. The Business Property Division saw a 20% reduction in paper statements processed.

“Adapting Quick Fields is to the different processes that we have at both the micro- and macro-level has been especially effective,” says Filippi.

Enterprise, naturally; Process automation, repeatedly

In the fall of 2010, Fresno County upgraded to Laserfiche Rio, including a WebLink Public Portal, which has both expanded the depth of efficiencies while formalizing an e-governance and enterprise risk management strategy. Filippi is confident that the upgrade and new features will go a long way to ensuring the sustainability of core business processes that meet service expectations in the years to come.

The decision to upgrade to Rio, he says, was based on its inherent scalability and bundled functionality—including Audit Trail and the Records Management Edition. “Rio made sense for how we’ve seen Laserfiche evolve,” Filippi says––that and the fact that the county can now use Laserfiche Workflow to automate review and approval processes. “We know we’re going to get the biggest bang for our buck from Workflow.” One process in particular, he continues, will be Business Property audits. “We’ve got airlines such as Sky West and agricultural companies like Dole that we are mandated to assess and audit annually. These audits can easily run 300–400 pages. Each part has to be reviewed by an auditor, which could be verifying an audit page by page or just going to a summary page. With Workflow, by the time the audit comes to them, they can go straight to the final calculations page and review the numbers from the junior auditor. That’s going to have a huge impact on productivity and efficiency.”

The combination of Quick Fields and Workflow will also enable an intelligent capture process that the ASR Office will use to reduce paper use in 85% of state-mandated forms and questionnaires sent out annually to agricultural businesses within the county. “We used to have 35,000 pieces of paper that needed to be opened and processed manually. Each piece of paper would have to cross three different skill sets and touch half a dozen individuals in three divisions. In the near future, one person will capture the document as soon as it arrives using the import feature in Snapshot, and then Quick Fields will pull the data off the questionnaires in real time and auto index it. Now, it’s in our system in 30 minutes.”

The WebLink portal will make ASR documents available online, transferring “ownership,” as Filippi puts it, of documents to citizens. “It’s not only efficient in terms of responsiveness, but it also makes government more transparent,” he says.

The move to Rio, he says, has not only been cost-effective, but supports an overall governance and enterprise risk management strategy. “Governance means different things depending on whom you’re talking to, but it’s essentially how we’re making information secure and available, responding to our citizens and maintaining transparency as efficiently and effectively as possible,” Filippi notes. “We’re no longer dependent on the county’s central IT department to administer, support and respond to our business requirements, and now we have the tools to gather the metrics that allow us to improve productivity and performance. It makes us more agile and responsive, whether that’s to citizens’ requests or to state mandates.”

Future plans include making ECM functionality available as a shared service for use county-wide. For instance, the Real Property division is collaborating with local city governments to move all the Permitting and Plans to electronic formats for processing within Laserfiche at the ASR Office using Quick Fields. Besides the four departments already using Laserfiche (ASR, Auditor-Controller/Treasurer-Tax Collector, Department of Public Works and the Sheriff), the Behavioral Health Services department and Department of Social Services are both looking into implementing Laserfiche as well. Filippi, for one, is confident more will follow: “It’s been a very organic and positive process. Now the technology supports our business needs, not vice versa.”

Besides the already low user adoption rate, the county faced stringent formatting for annual submission of digital copies of its land management records (“fee book pages”) to the state’s County Land Records Information Services (CLRIS) agency—now the Iowa Land Records System (ILR)—utilizing an application provided by the state to upload images. Or at least it was supposed to.

“We were never able to get this integration set up with our old system,” Koehler admits. “We had to pay the ILR an extra $2,500 in fees because we were simply unable to submit our images to the state.”

Agility in Action, Part 1: A New System for Less Than an Upgrade

By January of 2010, Koehler faced a challenge—and a choice. The county was on version 5 of EMC Application Xtender (AX), and it was being phased out by provider EMC/Documentum. So not only was Koehler’s team facing a mandatory upgrade, but also a service agreement renewal. And they were still likely facing $2,500 annually in fees to the state for fee book page submission.

“We were looking at a substantial enough reinvestment to retain our current system that it made sense to start looking at other solutions,” he says.

Koehler researched other CLRIS/ILR-approved systems and discovered Laserfiche via Advanced Systems, Inc. (ASI) based nearby in Waterloo, IA, which had a relationship with the county from servicing its printer and copiers. ASI solutions consultant Steve Lewis showed Koehler how Laserfiche’s Quick Fields Zone OCR component could capture and index information from specific areas of land records forms, which could then be used to submit images to ILR utilizing the state’s uploading application.

What’s more, implementing Laserfiche could address all of the county’s information management needs in a single system—at less cost than upgrading their existing system.

Agility in Action, Part 2: Deployment to Six Departments in Two Months

In March 2010, Bremer County purchased a 24-user Laserfiche Avante system with Quick Fields advanced capture, Import Agent and SDK. Just two months later, Laserfiche was successfully deployed to six county departments:

• Auditor
• Treasurer
• Attorney
• Recorder
• Assessor
• Building and Zoning

Each department was equipped with a scan station that Shane Peterson, solutions engineer at Advanced Systems, set up to automatically recognize and retrieve index information based on the standard forms used by each department.

The impact on scanning efficiency was immediate: in the Assessor’s office, four stacks of tax credit forms two feet tall were scanned and indexed within a few days. “Quick Fields automated all our scanning processes in all our departments,” Koehler says.

Agility in Action, Part 3: Six Months of Scanning in Less Than a Week

To illustrate the scale of improvement, Koehler uses the example of Bremer County’s Zoning Department. “Zoning was six months behind on their scanning,” he begins. “It would have taken staff over a month and a half to scan in all those documents using our old system. Instead, using Quick Fields, we were able to get those documents scanned in less than a week.”

At the same time, Koehler adds, staff who had given up on the previous system and scanning in general have warmed up to Laserfiche. “I am starting to see more people getting rid of the paper and using Laserfiche,” he says.

The end result of significantly improved scanning, Koehler says, is the reclaimed staff time. “We can devote the man hours we save from scanning for other projects.”

Agility in Action, Part 4: Integration Saves $2,500 in Fines

By November of 2010, Bremer County was submitting land records’ fee book pages automatically to the ILR, thanks to a combination of Quick Fields, Laserfiche Workflow and a custom integration developed by ASI:

• When staff in the Recorder’s Office scan land records, Quick Fields automatically retrieves index information from the image utilizing Zone OCR and Pattern Matching.
• Workflow then sends the image from a processing folder to a completed folder in the Laserfiche repository, where a custom integration exports the image and index information into an XML file.
• The XML file is then used to send the image to the state.
• This index information is then searchable by both the county and the state to tie the image to other pertinent index information about the land record.

Koehler says this process is not only more efficient, but more cost-effective, too. “We’re no longer charged $2,500 in fines for not providing the digital documents to the state that was such a problem with our old system,” he says.

Agility in Action, Part 5: Adding the Sheriff’s Office and More

The newest chapter of Bremer County’s information management overhaul has been the 2011 addition of five more named users for the Sheriff’s Office, which will use its own repository to catalogue video, photographs, ticketing, incident reports and other documents. The expanded implementation will include Laserfiche Web Access to enable the county attorney to retrieve information without going to the Sheriff’s Office to request that a detective put files on a disk for the attorney to review.

Koehler notes that with the addition of the Sheriff’s Office comes enhanced document security concerns. “We’ll be utilizing the auto-redaction capabilities of Quick Fields for more sensitive information, but we’re also able to manage the system from a central point of control,” he says.

Laserfiche use, Koehler predicts, will keep growing with each departmental success story. “The remaining three departments that don’t use Laserfiche are seeing how much the other departments love its ease of use and speed, so they’re starting to ask how they can use it too.”

“Rodney recognized that although SharePoint could do many great things for our organization, DoD 5015.2-certified records management wasn’t one of them,” says Ellis, who today is a senior web analyst for the Port Authority.

“SharePoint,” she explains, “with all of its many features is so much more robust than a network drive. In particular, the Port Authority uses document workspaces heavily, because they make it easy to collaborate on works in progress such as contracts. However, once you go beyond about 10,000 documents, you’ve got a real mess on your hands.”

According to Ellis, the Port Authority didn’t want to lose the collaboration features inherent in SharePoint, nor did it want to take a familiar interface away from the staff, so it needed to make sure that the ECM solution it selected had a seamless SharePoint integration. “I was the lead on the team that built our RFP,” Ellis says. “In the end, we had more than 400 requirements and 24 vendors vying for our business. The SharePoint integration was our top concern.”

Other important selection criteria included:

• Robust records management functionality.
• The ability to electronically store a wide range of file types, including AutoCAD drawings.
• Open architecture allowing integration with line-of-business applications such as CRM.
• Availability of workflow functionality for process improvements—and a reduced paper flow.

“Before we implemented Laserfiche, our records management plan was very inefficient,” Ellis explains. “We’d print out documents, process them by hand and then file them in cabinets. We had a whole warehouse dedicated to file storage, containing all kinds of old documents in Bankers Boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling that we didn’t have time to properly manage.”

Laserfiche + SharePoint = Transparency

By integrating Laserfiche with SharePoint, the Port Authority now has the ability to collaborate on documents, retain them electronically, and efficiently manage and dispose of digital records—all while giving users access to content through the SharePoint interface.

“Laserfiche has dramatically reduced the flow of paper throughout the organization,” says Ellis. “It’s opened up space for new offices and enabled us to tear down an entire warehouse for profitable use!”

But the cost and space savings aren’t the most significant benefits the Port Authority has realized as a result of its Laserfiche implementation. By acting as integrative middleware, Laserfiche allows users at the organization to access information in the environment with which they’re already familiar: SharePoint.

“The Port Authority’s had SharePoint for close to ten years, so people are pretty familiar with it,” says Ellis. “Most of our users won’t even know they’re using Laserfiche. With the integration, our content is searchable on an enterprise level, and the results are returned to users transparently through SharePoint. It enables us to access all our information from one central location without having to train our users on a new system.”

Laserfiche + SharePoint = Operational Efficiency

With Laserfiche in place, the Port Authority has started using it to streamline business processes. First on the list? The RFP and vendor selection process.

The Port Authority was established in 1952 as a political subdivision of the Commonwealth of Virginia for the purpose of stimulating commerce in the ports of the Commonwealth, promoting the shipment of goods and cargoes through the ports, improving the navigable tidal waters within the Commonwealth, and in general to perform any act or function which may be useful in developing, improving or increasing the commerce of the ports of the Commonwealth. As such, it contracts with dozens of vendors each year.

In the past, the RFP and vendor selection process was manual and paper-based:

• Proposals were submitted in hard copy and photocopies for each member of the selection committee.
• After a contract had been finalized, paper copies were made for the Contracts and Finance Departments, and also distributed to the contract administrators.
• Because copies of the contracts documents weren’t centralized, it was difficult to locate the most current version of any given contract or amendment.

With the help of Unity ECM, the Port Authority’s Laserfiche reseller, the organization has transformed the entire process as follows:

• Proposals are submitted electronically and automatically routed into SharePoint.
• Proposals are posted to a workspace in SharePoint for contract evaluation, scoring, changes and selection.
• Once the collaboration phase is finished and the contract is finalized, it is automatically pulled into Laserfiche, where it is retained according to contract retention schedules.
• From SharePoint, users can access the contract by clicking on a URL that takes them directly to the document stored in Laserfiche. The URL placeholder in SharePoint ensures that the data is synchronized between the two systems, simplifying version control.
• When searching for a contract, users run a search in SharePoint that seamlessly provides results from both the Laserfiche and SharePoint repositories.

“Even employees who aren’t technologically inclined appreciate the efficiency of our new process,” says Ellis. “In general, having real-time information available in a central location has been one of the most important process improvements our organization has received as a benefit of this project.”

Overcoming Implementation Hurdles

One implementation hurdle that Ellis hopes to help other people avoid when integrating Laserfiche with SharePoint has to do with Kerberos, a network authentication protocol that, according to Ellis, is “widely used but poorly documented.”

The Laserfiche/SharePoint integration tools are optimally designed for a single-server deployment, but according to Ellis, the Port Authority “has Laserfiche and SharePoint set up on a multi-server farm that consists of five different servers: the Laserfiche Application Server, Laserfiche SQL Server, SharePoint (MOSS) Server, SharePoint SQL Server and a server for Laserfiche Web Access. Prior to implementing Laserfiche, we didn’t realize that—because we have multiple servers—the integration wouldn’t work without a great deal of manual configuration and without using Kerberos. We had a few frustrating days before we figured that out.

“In the end,” she adds, “we had to enlist a senior network administrator to assist us by adding the SPNs on the domain controllers, since adding them to the Laserfiche or SharePoint servers doesn’t solve the issue.

“My two big pieces of advice for other organizations that want to deploy the Laserfiche/SharePoint integration are to get to know your Active Directory and SharePoint experts really well (if you’re not either one) and use the Laserfiche Support Site. Read those Knowledge Base articles!”

Even the hassle surrounding the Kerberos issue, however, didn’t dampen Ellis’ enthusiasm for Laserfiche. “If I had to do it all over again the same way, I’d do it all over again, hands-down,” she says. “Both our users and our executives are impressed with the efficiency and effectiveness the Laserfiche/SharePoint integration affords the organization. Putting a secure, centralized and powerful Laserfiche repository behind SharePoint has given everybody much better access to the information they need to do their jobs well.”

She ticks off a few of the benefits that give Laserfiche a leg up on the competition: “First, Laserfiche is easy to use, because it looks and functions like Windows and Google. Second, it’s stable and easy for the IT Department to maintain. Third, it has an open API that makes it easy to integrate with our other applications.”

These benefits, Duckett notes, are vital to Shakopee, which has a two-person IT Department supporting approximately 125 city staff in nine different departments. In fact, if Laserfiche wasn’t easy to use, maintain and integrate, the city wouldn’t have considered shaking up its approach to enterprise content management (ECM) by upgrading from four concurrent users to a 50-user Avante system.

Leading Up to the Upgrade

“We first implemented Laserfiche in 2005, using it to manage building permits through an integration with our PIMS building permit software,” Duckett explains, outlining how the process works:

- “We print barcoded permits that our records clerk scans into Laserfiche Quick Fields, which is an automated data capture solution.
- “Within Quick Fields we have an ODBC connection that connects to the PIMS database.
- “Quick Fields pattern matches the permit address, permit type and permit ID and automatically archives the document in the Laserfiche repository.”

She also notes that the city has long used Laserfiche to manage council agenda packets and other miscellaneous items, some of which are made available to the public through Laserfiche WebLink, a Web browser-based thin client that provides read-only access to public information.

The desire to upgrade the system came last year, when the Police Department hopped on the Laserfiche bandwagon. “In October 2010,” Duckett says, “the Police Department started using Laserfiche for evidence photos, and we integrated Laserfiche with New World, the PD’s case management system, to enable officers to automatically open photos that pertain to specific cases.”

The integration works as follows:

- Officers access an incident report in New World.
- By right-clicking on the New World screen, a box with a “Search Laserfiche” button pops up.
- Clicking the button launches Laserfiche and automatically takes the user directly to the right case folder, where he can view the evidence photos.

Jennifer Boudreau, Shakopee’s Police Records Technician, explains that one way the PD leverages the integration is to track graffiti, making it easier for officers to identify all instances of a tagger’s work so the city can recoup clean-up costs.

She also notes that Laserfiche allows officers to access photos in the field from their squad cars, which is something they couldn’t do in the past. “It’s an officer safety issue,” she says. “For example, if the officers come across a tagger with a known gang affiliation, they can treat that individual with more caution.”

Boudreau notes that in the past, search options were limited. With Laserfiche, officers can search photos by case number, but they can also search based on the metadata associated with each photo. This makes it easier to discern patterns that might not have otherwise been apparent.

Now that Shakopee has upgraded to Laserfiche Avante, the Police Department is looking forward to scanning all case files into the system. “Right now, case documents are contained in a paper file, which eliminates collaboration and the ability to work on the case at the same time as someone else,” says Boudreau. “As a result, we end up doing a lot of photocopying, which wastes paper. It can also get confusing to have so many copies of the same document floating around, because you never know which is the most current, complete version.”

Further, she explains that Laserfiche will be able to store more than copies of paper documents; where applicable, electronic case files will also contain audio files, squad car video and so on.

Since the Upgrade

Less than a month after implementing its 50-user Avante system, Shakopee has already brought the Finance Department onboard. It now uses Laserfiche Quick Fields to scan barcoded accounts payable documents into the repository, where they’re instantly searchable from the desktop.

“With the upgrade to Avante, which for us included the ‘Barcode and Validation’ and ‘Real Time Lookup and Validation’ packages, we can now use the pattern matching feature in Quick Fields, which automatically creates the folder structure in Laserfiche,” explains Duckett. “This creates a more efficient and seamless process for the users who scan documents into the system.”

She adds that once the Police Department starts using Laserfiche for its case files, it will use Quick Fields for its scanning, as well.

The next department to start using Laserfiche will likely be HR, which wants to use the system to digitize employee records and automate the hiring process using Laserfiche Workflow, a business process management tool that automatically performs specified actions (such as document routing) based on organizations’ unique business rules.

According to Duckett, this is just the beginning. “We hope to have every department using Laserfiche by this time next year.”

Additional Integrations

With the New World integration well underway, and the integration with the city’s PIMS building permit software already in place, Shakopee has big plans for linking Laserfiche to additional city applications. “Next, we plan to integrate Laserfiche with GeoLink, our GIS/mapping application,” says Duckett. “When you click on a land parcel, you’ll be able to launch Laserfiche and pull up all the documents associated with that particular piece of land.”

This functionality will be useful for multiple departments, including:

• The Police Department, which will use it for crime mapping.
• The Fire Department, which will be able to quickly retrieve building plans during emergencies.
• The Public Works Department, which will gain easy access to sewer information.

She goes on to explain that the city is also looking to integrate Laserfiche with JDE, Shakopee’s finance, payroll and HR software. “By integrating these two systems—and taking advantage of Laserfiche Workflow—we’ll be able to simplify the payment cycle with electronic invoices and purchase orders that can be automatically routed through the approval process. Once we digitize our HR records, we’ll be able to automate the hiring process as well.”

From Duckett’s perspective as an IT professional, the best thing about the planned integrations is how easy they’ll be to set up. “Because Laserfiche is used across so many cities and government entities, there are a lot of proven, pre-built integrations available to us at no additional cost.”

Avante = Affordability

In terms of cost-effectiveness, Duckett also appreciates how affordable it was to upgrade to Avante. “If we’d stayed with a concurrent user system and simply purchased the additional functionality and users we needed, it would have cost us $40,000 more than the upgrade to Avante,” she explains. “Plus, our named users now have 24/7 access to information, which is important from a productivity standpoint.”

She concludes, “Although it’s early in the implementation process, we’re starting to see financial and efficiency savings in the Finance, Building and Police Departments. Once we extend Laserfiche to all city departments and start creating workflows, we expect to save a lot more on paper and printing costs, and we also expect to greatly enhance employee efficiency.

“It’s our goal to have Laserfiche installed on every desktop in the city. We envision that it’ll be used as often as our e-mail client, providing instant access to records, streamlining business processes and allowing us to move data across multiple platforms.”

“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.”

When Jonathan Stafford took over as Administrator of LBPD’s Records Division in 2004, he inherited a legacy imaging system built with Kofax and ApplicationXtender. “Even back in 2004, I knew the system was outdated,” says Stafford, whose area of responsibility grew to include LBPD’s Technology Division in 2008. “We were in desperate need of a flexible, easy-to-use content management solution that would grant our officers and employees access to mission-critical information from wherever they happened to be.”

Ed Ivora, Assistant Administrator of LBPD’s Records and Technology Division, notes that the old system “took too much time to manage, administer and troubleshoot. We wanted an easily customizable ECM solution that we could use without advanced engineering degrees.”

In the past, the LBPD had made use of an optical jukebox for digital document storage. “We’d take files off the server and burn them to optical disks,” explains Ivora. “The jukebox was a big piece of hardware that stored 256 disks, but like anything mechanical, it was prone to breaking down.”

Stafford notes that it wasn’t just the unreliability of the jukebox that concerned him, it was also the expense and limited archiving capabilities. “We had a half-a-million dollar archiving solution that didn’t give us a way to dispose of records that had outlived their retention schedules. From an efficiency standpoint, it just didn’t make sense.”

In August 2009, the City of Long Beach chose Laserfiche as its enterprise content management (ECM) standard, which was something Stafford had been pushing for quite some time. “We were delighted when the City decided to standardize on Laserfiche, because it was our first choice for the PD. We knew that the simplicity and flexibility of the system would enable us to be more efficient.”

Curtis Tani, Director of Technology Services for the City of Long Beach, adds, “We selected Laserfiche to create more consistency, efficiency, and transparency, while saving the city thousands of dollars in equipment and maintenance fees.”

In the PD, the transition to Laserfiche—including the migration of three million documents and nearly ten million images from the department’s legacy system—went smoothly. “We were done with the conversion process way before I expected to be,” says Stafford.

All in all, Ivora estimates that installation, including file conversion, was 100% complete within two months.

Adaptability Is Key

Through the migration process, the LBPD was able to add 20 years’ worth of arrest records to the Laserfiche repository, along with 10 years’ worth of crime reports. “What had never been digitized in the past,” says Stafford, “were the field interview cards and case files. So the first new thing we did with Laserfiche was to bring in field interview cards.” According to Stafford, detectives had been pushing him to digitize the FI cards for quite some time, since instant access to them enables them to more easily solve crimes.

When capturing files, the LBPD uses Laserfiche Import Agent, a tool that automatically brings files into Laserfiche from network directories, fax servers and local folders. “Import Agent lets us use the fax servers, MFPs and other Xerox machines we already had in place,” Ivora explains.

Just as the Records & Technology Division didn’t have to invest in new hardware, it also didn’t have to invest in creating all-new folder structures. “Everyone was happy with the way general information—like maps, procedural documents, assault weapon information and so on—was structured and organized in our legacy system,” says Ivora. “Laserfiche is flexible and adaptable enough that we could mirror the old structure in a Laserfiche folder called PD Docs, allowing people to access and view this information in a familiar format.”

He adds, “Laserfiche is great because it’s easy to customize it to our needs.”

Expanding Access to the Field

To date, the LBPD’s repository contains a wide range of electronic and scanned content, including:

• Tickets.
• Restraining orders.
• Arrest reports.
• Timecards.
• Policies and procedures.
• Forms.
• And more.

With Laserfiche, LBPD officers have the ability to retrieve many of these document types directly from their patrol vehicles, whereas in the past they could only view them from computers in the police station. Laserfiche WebLink, a browser-based thin client that provides secure, read-only access to the repository, gives them immediate access to these documents when they’re in the field, saving time and ensuring that they follow the proper procedures and have the most current information on hand.

“One thing I’ve learned over thirteen years of working for the PD is that you have to make things easy for the officers,” says Stafford. “They need to worry about protecting us, not about finding the right paperwork.”

Targeting Gang Members

The PD’s gang injunction program has benefitted tremendously from remote access to the Laserfiche repository. Gang injunctions are court-issued restraining orders prohibiting gang members from participating in specific activities such as loitering, smoking marijuana or wearing gang colors. These injunctions allow officers to arrest named gang members for injunction violations rather than waiting for a more serious crime to occur.

In order to make an arrest based on a gang injunction, officers must first confirm that the gang member in question has previously been served a copy of all court documents related to the injunction. In the past, LBPD officers were forced to call around the PD to confirm proof of service. Tracking down the paperwork was frequently a time-consuming task that resulted in missed opportunities to make arrests.

Today, a tight, three-way integration between Laserfiche, Tiburon (the PD’s records management application) and Business Objects (LBPD’s business intelligence software) gives officers the ability to pull up specific Crystal Reports containing hyperlinks to images stored in the Laserfiche repository. Through Laserfiche WebLink, officers can instantly access the injunction-related information and images needed to make arrests.

“This integration allows us to deliver injunction information to officers in the field in as few clicks as possible,” says Stafford. “The impact has been huge.”

In fact, on November 8, 2010, the LBPD, along with Long Beach’s mayor and prosecutors, announced a massive gang injunction against more than 100 known gang members with ties to the Mexican Mafia. The injunction targets gang members from all over Los Angeles County who commit crimes in Long Beach—not just those based in Long Beach. Without Laserfiche, enforcing this injunction would be difficult, to say the least.

Working Up to Workflow

Although Stafford is happy with the progress LBPD has made with Laserfiche so far, he explains, “We’re going to push this system to automate business processes as well as eliminate our paper files.”

Laserfiche Workflow will be the engine driving the automation of business processes, and the uniform ordering process will be the first one to be transformed.

Currently, officers fill out a paper form when they need new boots or a new shirt. The form must be approved by the officer’s sergeant and then his commander before it moves on to Personnel. After Personnel checks the officer’s order history, the form moves to the Fiscal Department, which forwards it to the uniform service. After that, Fiscal must call the officer and inform him that he may place his order directly with the uniform service.

According to Stafford, “It’s a frustrating, repetitive process that would be much simpler with e-forms and automatic e-mail routing.”

Once the uniform ordering process has been automated, Stafford’s team will tackle police report request process, which will enable employees to more efficiently manage citizens’ and insurance companies’ requests for police reports.

Business-Led Technology

With 1,450 employees in the LBPD, all of whom have access to Laserfiche, Stafford notes that the system’s ability to balance central control with local flexibility is vital.

“We create different repositories for different divisions because they all have their own unique document types and preferred filing methods,” explains Stafford. “Laserfiche gives us central control over system administration and security, while giving each of the divisions control over its own information.”

He continues, “When we were evaluating ECM technology, we knew we wanted a system that would adapt to the needs of our business, not the other way around. Laserfiche is helping us solve crimes and save lives, and it’s doing it in the way we want, not the way a vendor prescribes.”

As he outlines the overall benefits of Laserfiche, including simplicity, user-friendliness and adaptability, Stafford points out that the PD is only one year into a five-year implementation. “We’re getting there,” he says, “but this is just the beginning.”

Led by Stormwater Quality Coordinator Alan Searcy, Central Records Administrator Sharon Blackstock, and Imaging Technician Greg Buchanan, DAG evolved into an ad hoc governance committee, setting recordkeeping and retention policies for each department, as well as standardizing document indexing for interdepartmental use. “My goal in the beginning,” says Searcy, “was to get as much ‘buy-in’ as possible for our fledgling imaging program. Working together on interdepartmental projects is a proven recipe for success in Lakewood.” The Digital Archives Group is a prime example of that fact.

DAG initiated the purchase of Laserfiche in 2001 from Colorado-based reseller Phil Landreth of S. Corporation, with several departments sharing in the cost. “Laserfiche was the most user-friendly solution we looked at, and we knew that was going to be very important,” Blackstock says. “Laserfiche also had a very strong presence in cities around our size (population: 145,000), so we knew that support for local government operations was in place.”

Although Laserfiche was first used only by the Engineering Division and the City Clerk’s Office, it eventually spread to other departments. As new departments joined in the project, they sent representatives to DAG meetings.

Initially, Laserfiche was used for archiving permanent records and closed case files. After a couple of years, the Finance Department became the first to manage active records with Laserfiche by scanning sales tax returns. More active records management followed as Laserfiche use began spreading to DAG members’ departments. Eventually most of Lakewood’s 10 departments used Laserfiche, each relying on DAG’s training and best practices to scan and manage their own records.

“With every new project, people really welcome our support and suggestions. We all listen to each other and are willing to hear new ideas,” Buchanan says. “At the same time, people don’t just say, ‘I’m going to do this’ and call up IT—DAG helps define the project and gives the go-ahead.” The City Clerk’s Office created Buchanan’s position as Imaging Technician in 2002 to facilitate Laserfiche projects by assisting departments in training users and developing and managing scanning projects.

Today, DAG’s goals are being met—long-term records are being archived and protected, concurrent retrieval of imaged records is possible, and storage space for maps, plats and plans has been reduced. What’s more, interdepartmental cooperation has resulted in a citywide sense of pride and ownership of Laserfiche.

Breaking Down Silos to Build an Agile Enterprise

IT Software Services Manager Tom Charkut credits DAG with addressing the training element since Lakewood began using Laserfiche in 2001 “in a way IT just couldn’t.” But by 2005, Charkut says, “There were so many departments using Laserfiche that it just made sense to centralize the software maintenance and support.” IT took over Laserfiche system administration in 2006, as well as the software maintenance costs.

The City of Lakewood’s IT staff of 27 supports more than 1,000 city employees. “We’re a small team with big shoes to fill,” Charkut admits. Filling big shoes with different sizes and styles, he says, requires an agile development philosophy.

According to Charkut, one key component in solving the diverse but often overlapping information needs of Lakewood’s business units was utilizing the Laserfiche SDK and its Microsoft-standard .NET API to integrate with legacy business applications. “Since Laserfiche was an enterprise-wide system,” he says, “we needed to figure out how to integrate it with our other line-of-business systems.”

A recent example is an integration between Laserfiche and the Planning and Public Works Department’s new building permit system. “The user will be in the permit system, and using the permit number, they click on a ‘documents’ button we developed that shows them the documents in Laserfiche,” he explains. “If they need to e-mail those documents, then we send URLs linking to those documents using Web Access. Laserfiche gives us the ability to arrange the information so it’s at the user’s fingertips.”

The user, Charkut notes, never leaves the permitting application. What’s more, the additional content is referenced from its single, centralized Laserfiche repository. Similarly, integration with the city’s GeoSmart GIS application geo-enables searches for employees across various systems whether it’s for code enforcement cases or service requests from residents, as well as for any documents—including plats, plans and forms—already in Laserfiche.

“For us, Laserfiche integration has helped break down silos,” Charkut says. “It’s all about decentralized capture, centralized storage and an enterprise library.”

What a Transparent Web We Weave

Now, as the City maps out an overhaul of Lakewood’s Web strategy, Laserfiche is one of the ingredients. “Our Web strategy in the past has been a patchwork of stuff. Just last year we said, ‘We have to do something about this—we’re getting 5,000 hits a day,’” says Charkut. “Part of our plan is to promote government transparency through the use of Web self-service, including access to records contained in the Laserfiche system.”

Lakewood also finds itself in the middle of an electronic records management inventory and assessment, where consultants are actually suggesting new and future uses of Laserfiche. Building on DAG’s solid support foundation and Lakewood IT’s agile, integrated Web strategies, the city is now assessing whether and when to upgrade to Laserfiche Rio, with its scalable, flexible user and module licensing—as well as its unlimited servers—to meet the needs of more and more departments, business processes and users, both internally and externally, from a single enterprise application.

“We are evaluating the ROI of Rio,” jokes Charkut. “We will assess that model on a 7- to 10-year timeframe.”

Part of how TS drives Cary’s business units is to, whenever possible, follow an internal shared services model. The challenge, Stice says, is accommodating “fairly dissimilar” business processes with the same technology foundation, so answering to these unique needs has made agility an important factor in infrastructure investments. “When we look at purchasing new applications, we want them to be flexible enough to meet departmental needs, but able to be tied together with everything else when we need it to be.”

Stice offers the town’s GIS system as an example. “Everything we do is geo-spatial,” he explains. “Addresses are used and shared by departments. But where the Engineering Department does business by project number, Planning uses case numbers.” The challenge, he says, is finding a way to accommodate the unique ways individual departments work with information, while still providing a common foundation to link that information together across departments.

“We want the business to drive the software, not the software to drive the business,” Stice concludes.

The Need: Uniting Content and Contract Management

This was the mindset in 2003 when Rodney Overton, one of Cary’s three business analysts, first looked at content management to manage the over 300 contract documents received annually by the Town Clerk’s Office. Town staff was accessing contract documents by traveling to the clerk’s office, having the clerk look up reference numbers from an AS/400-based Contract Control System (CCS), then locating the paper contract from a labyrinth of file cabinets and making copies. The search was on for a more efficient way.

Overton was aware that many North Carolina municipalities already were using Laserfiche as their enterprise content management system, so he contacted Kevin Smith of Laserfiche reseller One Source Document Solutions to learn more. Smith demonstrated how, using Laserfiche, staff in the clerk’s office could scan and store contracts while making them available to town staff—even multiple staff simultaneously—right from their desktop computers. Overton recalls easing staff concerns following a prior experience with a cumbersome imaging system. “Laserfiche had an easy-to-use Windows look and feel everyone could see themselves using,” he recalls. For his part, he liked how Laserfiche Web Access could create URL shortcuts to documents. “I saw tremendous potential for integration with a lot of our primary departmental applications as we rolled it out.”

In spring 2003, implementation took place in the Clerk’s Office. The Engineering Department followed a month later, presenting the challenges of larger document volume as well as different types of documents. Laserfiche’s ability to categorize documents according to several template fields proved significantly effective. “We started out with about 15 template fields, which we’ve narrowed down to about seven that we use today,” Overton says. “In 2007, ‘Project Number’ and ‘Document Type’ fields became very useful as we began to find ways to integrate Laserfiche with our GIS software, MapInfo.”

Rounding out this initial deployment, One Source assisted the Cary Police Department with a massive migration of some 190,000 documents from its legacy imaging system to its own volume within the Laserfiche repository. Since then, the Cary Police Department hasn’t looked back, adding more than 10,000 documents a year to its Laserfiche system.

System Integrations “Just a Click Away”

A 2006 upgrade to Laserfiche 7.2 brought with it enhanced opportunities to integrate Laserfiche with line-of-business applications. “Laserfiche 7.2 allowed you to save searches; we felt that if you could save a search in Web Access, then you should be able to execute a search using a URL link,” Overton says. “Through testing, research and help from One Source, we were able to create a URL search where we could pass search information from a simple browser shortcut and have Web Access perform a search and pull up the desired documents.”

Overton soon wrote an AS/400 CL program that uses the Contract Control Number in the Contract Control system to display a contract in Web Access. While the user is viewing contract information on the Contract Control System, all they need to do is press a hotkey to initiate a Web Access search that displays the contract image in detail.

“Now users don’t even have to log into Laserfiche—with the press of button they can see all related documents for a contract,” he says.

A few months later, Overton developed another “hotkey” integration for Cary’s MapInfo GIS software. The ability to search across multiple templates, such as the clerk’s as well as engineering departments’, is helpful to bring up all documents for projects outlined in MapInfo. With this integration, a MapInfo user only needs to click an address, select a project and a search is launched that pulls up a list of all related project documents in Web Access—quickly focusing searches in a town where, “everything is geo-centric,” as TS Director Stice puts it.

To simplify multi-template searches, Overton—along with co-workers Wilson Farrell and Ken Guttman—created a small internal website to perform central searches using Web Access. “So instead of running into character limitations with MapInfo when we have more than one template search, we can pass critical information to an internal website to launch the remaining portion of the script,” says Overton. “This helps tremendously in minimizing the character length of the URL needed for integrating into other applications.”

Creating a Standard for Imaging—and Image-Enablement

This image enablement has proven so useful Overton says he’s now looking at ways to integrate Laserfiche with the Police Department’s RMS software as well as the Accounting Department’s Sungard Public Sector financial software. “Sungard has an imaging interface that was built specifically around a few select products on the market,” he says. “Now, with the ease of use and flexibility of Laserfiche, we hope to utilize this part of the Sungard interface to integrate the two.” Overton says that after taking part in the inaugural Eastern North Carolina State Laserfiche Users Group earlier this year, he’s looking forward to sharing his experience with fellow users.

“From our User Group meetings, I know lots of municipalities here in the Southeast that have both Sungard Public Sector and Laserfiche software,” he says. “So having that network of fellow users is very helpful in terms of sharing experience and ideas.”

And it ends up being more cost-effective, too, he adds. “You’re talking about tremendous cost savings when you don’t have to consult with a third party to write an integration. For our MapInfo integration, if we had to hire a consultant, it would have been at least $10,000, if not more. Multiply that per application and the savings can really add up,” Overton says. “The way we are able to link to documents in Laserfiche from another application really makes a difference in terms of value and functionality.”

As such, Laserfiche has become the integrative middleware used by several departments to access and share content. Besides Engineering, the Town Clerk’s office and the Police Department, the Parks and Recreation and Planning Departments have also implemented Laserfiche, with plans to expand to the Accounting Department as well as Inspections and Permits.

“Laserfiche has become a strategic application,” Stice says. “It’s the standard we use to manage paper and it’s the only one we use to access that information and tie it to other information.”

Tying that information together, Overton notes, has proven its value both in terms of saving IT resources, but also in the value of enhanced functionality to deliver shared services. “Laserfiche’s Web Access has made integration just a click away,” he 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 benefitted 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 could 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?”

When it came time to upgrade to Laserfiche 8, Hummel saw that a consolidation to an enterprise solution made sense to streamline administration, and would allow him to better leverage his own staff to handle future integrations and deployments. Eugene’s long-time reseller VPCI, of course, had an app for that: Laserfiche Rio enterprise content management.

In April 2009, Hummel submitted a memorandum to Eugene’s Central Services Advisory Board outlining a plan to consolidate Eugene’s four Laserfiche systems by moving to Rio. Besides recapping the “high return on investment” Eugene had already enjoyed in the areas of sustainability, efficiency and “new capabilities”—GIS and SharePoint integration among them—as well as asset protection over the last ten years, he outlined the potential benefits of moving to Rio:

• Unlimited Servers and Repositories: With the unlimited servers included in the Rio system, Hummel’s team could easily establish environments for testing and pilot projects.
• Named User Licenses: Instead of limiting mission-critical users like judges and 911 operators with first-come, first-serve concurrent licensing, licenses assigned to individual users would provide constant access.
• Enterprise-Wide Features: Because Rio licenses come fully loaded with a complete suite of applications, features currently used by certain departments—including Workflow, Records Management and the Laserfiche SharePoint integration—would now be available city-wide.
• Unlimited Read-Only Public Connections: Rio’s Public Portal provides unlimited read-only connections through Laserfiche WebLink 8, which would enable the city to meet surges in public demand for information.

Hummel points out that a 100% credit offered by Laserfiche, as well as pooling support costs, not only made the Rio upgrade affordable—only about 10% more of what the four contracts totaled—but it also allowed the city to centralize administration and IT staffing for further deployment and customization.

Leveraging a city-wide telecom tax set up to support three-year IT projects, Hummel was able to secure a funding boost to launch the project, while giving departments a temporary break from their own support costs until 2013. The Board agreed with the plan and the project was funded in summer 2009.

The Rio Reality

“We didn’t really start our Rio deployment until after the 2010 Laserfiche Institute Conference in Los Angeles,” Hummel explains. “We have a large enough IT staff to do a lot of work in-house, so we wanted to learn as much as we could before we got started.”

His strategy’s working; the Rio upgrade will be complete this month. “Rio not only solves our licensing problem, but it also lays the framework for Laserfiche as a common content management platform for everyone across the enterprise,” Hummel adds. “Beyond that, it has the potential to become a real information sharing and collaboration tool.”

The biggest improvement, Hummel says, is centralizing Laserfiche administration and service. “I think we’ve made a more professional IT environment for Laserfiche—which is part of laying the groundwork for future deployment,” he says. “We’re proactive in that we’re able to apply patches and fixes all at once. Where we had functions within departments before, we’re able to cultivate expertise in the right place as far as re-aligning departmental staff into central server administration.”

At the same time, he adds, the Rio centralization has afforded Eugene greater control and oversight of its information assets. “A big benefit is that the whole system is auditable. Because Laserfiche authorization is now controlled by a central administrator, in respect to security roles, we’re able to lock down repositories and folders according to different administrative needs,” Hummel says. “Now, we’re treating Laserfiche like one of our larger information systems such as ERP and database servers that also encompass risk management and compliance.”

And, he says, having a single, standardized ECM system allows staff to be more self-sufficient. “We have a lot of applications with embedded Laserfiche components, so we use the Laserfiche SDK a lot. We’re a .NET shop, so that’s the kind of flexibility that’s important to us,” Hummel says. “Laserfiche offers flexibility and programmability in terms of .NET integration that allows a full-featured IT shop like ours to use the tools we already have to fully customize it for our own applications.”

He points to a recent example. “We built an ASP.net web application for our Planning and Development department for building inspectors that has GIS maps, their routes, etc. All supporting documents are stored in Laserfiche, but the inspectors use the application in their car, and click on a button and the supporting documents come up in WebLink—without them knowing where it came from. All the searching and metadata is behind the scenes. We basically wrote our own client.”

Standardizing Enterprise-Wide

For Hummel, standardization is its own combination of reality and potential. “In government, everything seems to grow in silos, by workgroup and department,” Hummel says. “The ability to easily and seamlessly automate information across organizational boundaries—it’s kind of the holy grail of IT.

“Just having Laserfiche isn’t going to get us there, but our Rio-based architecture—and by that I mean both the placement of servers on our network as well as the way we positioned our repositories to simplify the creation of shared processes—gives us the technical framework that will allow departments to create business processes to cut through silos. That’s a good start,” he adds.

He also points to the promise of Workflow, which will enable his department to easily develop and implement standardized, repeatable processes. “For city-wide applications, we’ll write our own custom user interfaces. We want to use the workflow engine, but we’ll build in interactivity using the ToolKit API and .NET,” he says.

One of these new business processes is city-wide contract management. “Right now, every department keeps its own copies of contracts and its own retention policies, even though everything’s in the City Recorder’s archives. They may not know what’s being kept centrally and if they do, they think it’s a big process to access them,” Hummel says. “One of the things that attracted us to Rio was the idea of transparent records management, so we could make the actual storage transparent and be able to assign access to certain folders according to who needs to get them. That way, we can really increase the transparency of information back to the organization, which will translate into efficiency.”

Hummel points to this efficiency in the evolution—and simplification—of how the Eugene Police Department (EPD) shares reports with the Eugene Municipal Court (MuniCourt). The EPD first used shortcuts to a special distribution folder in Laserfiche, then a custom integration that briefcased police reports to move it into the MuniCourt repository—which still created multiple copies. Now with Rio, EPD staff use a simple “yes/no” MuniCourt template field to give the court read-only access to designated reports in the EPD folder, which are searchable by case number. “We actually had a customization written for the prosecutor [to briefcase reports for MuniCourt]. But since going to Rio, now that they’re sharing common services, we’ve eliminated a ton of custom code and complexity,” Hummel says.

Reaching ROI

Hummel is confident this self-sufficiency will translate into enterprise efficiency, especially staffing-wise. “We’re not talking about using automation to eliminate positions, but we’re looking at using technology to cope with positions we have already lost during the economic downturn, as well as any future staff reductions,” Hummel says. “We want to make sure the level of service doesn’t denigrate. We want to cope with the reduced footprint using automation tools. Laserfiche is one way to do that.”

Besides efficiency, he says, Rio has allowed his staff the freedom and focus to excel as well. “The Information Services Department is 40-plus people, where all six city departments have two to three analysts to determine their application needs,” Hummel explains. “Every department is really its own business. One of the challenges is to serve very specialized departmental needs with a fairly modest staff. Each of member of my team is assigned directly to a department for application support, so professional collaboration among IT staff has always been a challenge.

“Laserfiche has been a unifier,” he adds. “We have a team of Laserfiche IT folks where we can make the most of where the expertise lies to serve all the different departments. It’s made the upgrade possible. We have this collaborative environment that’s made the lines between assignments more fuzzy so hopefully that will be a catalyst for other [IT-driven] endeavors.”

Hummel notes functionality his staff once had to develop themselves is now out-of-the-box. “The last version of WebLink, we basically re-wrote it to be our own version. But WebLink 8 is essentially like the Adobe reader interface, so now we’re ripping out custom code.” That, and the collaborative, catalyzing environment standardizing on the Rio ECM system inspires, is encouraging, he says, both for the success of the Laserfiche consolidation, but in terms of the reality and potential of his own department.

“If you look at companies like Microsoft or Apple, they owe a lot of their success to the way developers are able to build innovative solutions in it,” Hummel says. “It’s not locked down. Like Laserfiche, it’s a broader base of development that encourages more innovation, because users are not just customers, they’re partners.”

Not surprisingly, against this backdrop of budgetary efficiency, Neumann and his team have initiated several infrastructural enhancements to the city’s technology wheelhouse that have resulted most recently in a redesign of the city’s website. Completed in May 2010, the redesign is the culmination of an e-Government Web strategy used by virtually all of Oshkosh’s departments to provide automated information and services to citizens. Helping to drive these services, Neumann says, is Oshkosh’s use of the Laserfiche WebLink 8 public portal, a key component of Laserfiche’s enterprise content management (ECM) suite.

Finding an ECM System and Standardizing for the Future

One of the first things Neumann did when he came to Oshkosh a decade ago was to implement a proper ECM solution in the City Clerk’s Office. Paper storage in the already packed offices, he remembers, “was like trying to stuff ten pounds into a five-pound bag.” What’s more, the legacy document indexing system, MuniMetrix, was proprietary, “which to me was just scary,” he adds.

On September 11, 2001, Gary Eide of Laserfiche reseller Computer Technologies Access showed Neumann how a Laserfiche system could help not just the Clerk’s Office, but also just about every other city department. “I liked the fact that [Laserfiche] was non-proprietary and SQL-based. Plus, the way the system extracted text from documents [via OCR] seemed very forward-thinking, and we like to think of Oshkosh as a forward-thinking city,” Neumann says.

Neumann had cut his teeth on mainframe systems in the military, so Laserfiche appealed to his service-oriented architecture (SOA) sensibilities. “When I look at a product, I look at any use different business units have even remotely in common,” he says. “Laserfiche is an application that crosses many boundaries—it’s one product that literally touches every department.”

Neumann seized the opportunity to adopt a single, unified standard for the city’s metadata. “Standardization was one of the initial core changes that would move Oshkosh forward,” he says. And it would do so by providing a common model for content storage, making it easier to find, link and retrieve: “We saw the potential for the cross-utilization and system interoperability that would allow for distribution and cross-interaction. Plus we’d minimize compatibility issues and allow for future expansion and technology migration over time.”

In February 2002, Computer Technologies Access installed and configured the new Laserfiche system in less than a week, and the impact on the Clerk’s Office and the Inspections Division was immediate:

• Storage space was converted back to office space.
• Internally, staff no longer needed to print documents to image them; they could be imported directly using Laserfiche Snapshot.
• Departmental employees were given their own access to the Laserfiche repository.

Implementing Laserfiche WebLink, Neumann says, sparked what he calls “an evolution” of Oshkosh’s e-Government strategy. Procedurally, because departmental staff could now make public information available themselves, Neumann’s department was no longer inundated with requests to publish cumbersome PDFs or send out mass e-mails to citizens. “Wisconsin has a pretty comprehensive open records law, so pretty much everything had to be made available,” Neumann explains. “WebLink basically extended public information services right to people’s living rooms.

“Customer satisfaction went through the roof—we started getting complimentary phone calls instead of derogatory ones,” he laughs.

Evolving a Successful e-Government Strategy

Establishing formal ROI statistics when your IT department is spending 33% less than it did ten years ago seems redundant, but Neumann happily details the self-sufficiency of Oshkosh’s IT department. “I like to brag that we don’t contract anything out —not even wiring. Everything is done in-house, including our network architecture, design and management,” he explains. “In that sense, I’d say Laserfiche fits us because it’s very self-driven and intuitive to get around. The biggest thing I’ve enjoyed is the ease of upgrades. We do them all ourselves, without a single hitch.”

He adds, “The Knowledge Base on the [Laserfiche Support Site] is also very beneficial —we really haven’t had to contact our reseller for support issues.”

At the same time, he says, using Laserfiche has gone a long way in supporting the evolution of Oshkosh’s e-Government strategy, which now includes 12 departments using WebLink to push out information through seven municipal Websites. “Every electronic document we create can be managed departmentally,” Neumann explains. “We just have to set up security within Laserfiche, and as soon as a document is in the system, it can be made available for public view.”

In Neumann’s view, making information more available isn’t just about transparency, but also the government’s responsibility for the decisions it makes. “When we talk about WebLink we’re really talking about transparency and accountability—they go hand in hand,” he says. “We have our resolutions and ordinances posted online dating back to 1990, and residents love that they can research an issue or an address going back 20 years.” Online inspection reports, for instance, are used by both potential homebuyers and realtors, while contractors can see a virtual history of work done on a property.

And insurance companies and attorneys access accident reports through WebLink—a process that accounts for 350 visits to Oshkosh’s Website each day. “Because accident reports are public records, they are uploaded when the patrol car gets back to the station, so they’re available online in real time,” Neumann explains.

It isn’t just citizens who benefit from the efficiency, as Oshkosh administrators also recognize the value of Laserfiche. “Our municipality is driven by our city manager and city council, and using Laserfiche to automatically publish the agendas and minutes from our boards and commissions really illustrates how effective it is,” Neumann says.

According to Neumann, the recently re-launched city Website was the culmination of five years of adding interaction based on citizens’ input, plus some inspiration, he says, from the best practices of the Center for Digital Government and Government Technology’s Best of the Web winners (“They won those awards for a reason,” Neumann comments). But final buy-in and approval came as a result of an internal assessment by the Oshkosh City Manager and Media Services Department. “We sat down with them and went over their likes and dislikes,” Neumann explains.

Next, Neumann’s looking at integrating Laserfiche with the city’s internal Munis systems. “If you’ve got the framework, you want to utilize it the best you can. I’d like to get to a full ERP integration where we’re bringing a number of departments through a single, shared application. If we can do it ourselves, and I think we can, we’ll do it,” he says.”I take it as a challenge to use little or no capital, because with Laserfiche, we’ve been able to do that the whole time. We’ve achieved all our goals annually.”

“Choosing Laserfiche as our ECM system was definitely an investment, not a purchase,” he adds. “It’s gone a long way toward keeping my budget the way it is and it’s allowed our departments to be a lot more self-sufficient in terms of managing their own content and making it available to the public.”

“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.”

When Diane Ward became City Clerk in 2000, she found the city’s Administration office had a legacy ECM system in place that wasn’t being used to manage much. “I found the application cumbersome and not user-friendly,” she says. From an IT perspective, the legacy system was even less friendly. “The company was purchased by other document imaging companies twice. The second time would have required us to migrate to a different system and the maintenance agreement was already pretty high,” remembers Rose Holman, MIS Director. “Since we needed to convert existing data anyway, we were able to make the case to our city council that we needed to find something that fit our needs better.”

Ward and Holman contacted Laserfiche reseller Cities Digital. “The Laserfiche system seemed easier for the end user, which is really important, and the administration of the system seemed easier to understand,” Ward says. Implementation began in Stillwater’s Administration Department in 2005. “That allowed me to familiarize myself with the program and set up the folder structures, templates, and administration console, so we had that foundation in place for future deployment,” Ward says.

Ward began by making agenda packets, minutes from council meeting and various city boards and commissions, as well as resolutions and ordinances, available to staff through the Laserfiche repository, and the impact was immediate. “I knew the system was successful because it was easy to use and manage. Requests that would have taken me days to complete, sometimes weeks, were able to be completed almost immediately,” Ward says.

Leveraging the Value of ECM Agility through Standardization and Integration

A year later, backlog conversion began in the Finance Department – at times duplicating scanning done into the department’s Springbrook financial management software. Staff soon discovered that finding content using Laserfiche was easier, so Holman contacted Cities Digital to integrate the two applications. “It’s a daily timesaver that enables staff to put information into Laserfiche more quickly and locate it more easily.”

In 2009, Laserfiche deployment extended to the Planning and Building Inspection Department, turning into another chance to explore the value of Laserfiche as integrative middleware, which makes existing data easier to find and use. “As we started putting planning documents into Laserfiche, we realized we could create better searches of, say, address files if we integrated some of the information with the PermitWorks applications we used to do building permits,” so Holman again contacted Cities Digital to integrate Laserfiche with PermitWorks. Key to the integration’s success was standardizing the metadata of the property file folders when it was migrated from the city’s legacy ECM system. These folders constituted the bulk of the city’s information requests, so adding the parcel identification numbers (PINs) used by other departments and applications to the Laserfiche folders made information even easier to find.

“The benefit is again the ease and scope of research now that the Planning and Building Departments are also using Laserfiche,” Ward explains. “We can see what planning cases involved a specific property, which building permits were issued and the actions of any board or commission or the City Council on that property.”

It’s this ability to align Stillwater’s information assets with ways it can be more useful and therefore more valuable to the community that are at the core of Ward’s ECM strategy. In 2008, for instance, Ward lobbied for and received funding for Laserfiche Records Management Edition (RME) to mitigate compliance risks. “If I could do it all over again, I would have purchased Records Management Edition when we initially purchased Laserfiche,” she sighs. “Because I didn’t, there was some extra work involved in setting up RME.” But once set up, she says, RME’s automated retention schedules by document type give Ward the ability to easily comply with State policies that the city had been manually following for over 20 years.

Implementing a Popular Public Portal Strategy

The City of Stillwater's WebLink 8 Public Portal, where searchers can access council meeting minutes from as far back as 1888.

This potent combination of automation and transparency has also guided the city’s Web portal strategy. When the city implemented Laserfiche, Ward made resolutions, ordinances, agenda packets, and minutes from council meeting and various city boards and commissions (some dating back as far as 1888) available to the public using Laserfiche WebLink. The public portal proved so popular that Stillwater recently upgraded to WebLink 8 to take advantage of new features including customized searches, new customization and layout tools, and support for the iPhone and Android mobile devices.

“Our Planning Department developed an On-Line Property Information Lookup Application through our Website which links any planning cases related to a particular address and can be viewed through that application and opened through WebLink,” says Ward. “We hope to make easements and building permits available as well.”

The next step, Ward says, is making WebLink a one-stop shop for Stillwater’s public information. “Presently we post PDF minutes of our City Council and Boards and Commissions meetings on our site,” she says. “We hope to eliminate some staff time by placing them only in Laserfiche. Right now we get 250 hits a month, but that will increase immensely once we direct people to WebLink.”

Holman, for her part, has been impressed by the utility and versatility of Laserfiche. “As we move into other departments such as the police and fire departments, we’ll find ways to make life easier there, too,” she says. “Laserfiche is becoming the backbone for many of our departmental programs, which makes it even more valuable as the central repository for all our content.”

Ward, understandably, sees the value of Laserfiche agile ECM a little differently. “Our City Administrator, who is not real computer savvy, is just amazed at how fast we can find information,” she says. “I have been in municipal government since 1981 and, next to replacing a typewriter with a word processor, Laserfiche makes my job responsibilities easier to complete and manage.”

“Essentially, Laserfiche has become integral to our way of managing information,” she concludes.

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.”

“Our approach to technology has always been to be proactive, not reactive,” says Town Clerk Lisa Garcia.

Adopting Records Management

A decade ago, however, the Clerk’s Office just needed a better way to respond to records requests. “It was a very political time and we had more public records requests than we were used to,” Garcia remembers. “Our office would sometimes spend weeks going through ten years of minutes and resolutions by hand, reading each page, just to fill a single public records request.”

Garcia researched document management solutions and selected Laserfiche for its ability to organize scanned documents into a secure, easily searchable repository. The Clerk’s Office was soon answering requests that used to take days—sometimes weeks—almost immediately. Laserfiche became the go-to application for backing up, storing and retrieving copies of the town’s hard records.

In 2007, Garcia noticed an Arizona newspaper was investigating the municipal e-mail accounts of several counties and cities, exposing security and compliance breaches along the way. “We started seeing cases across the state where old e-mails had become a liability,” Garcia explains. She had reason to be concerned: All ten of Florence’s departments kept their correspondence and records in Outlook as e-mails.

Garcia saw the value of adopting a formal records management policy for e-mail correspondence and spurred a town-wide “E-mail Project” to initiate the purchase of the Laserfiche Records Management module. Garcia and her team worked with Linda Russell and Susan Mosby from reseller Doc United to set up records management in the town’s existing Laserfiche system, as well as create retention schedules to fit the town’s needs.

Data Governance: Making Information Useful

With data governance, data stewards like Garcia ensure that important data assets are formally managed throughout the enterprise. It doesn’t just ensure that the enterprise can become more efficient, but relates to an entirely new way of thinking about information. Technology can help in the process, but isn’t the entirety of the process, as data governance consists of four components: people, process, technology and risk management. But what’s clear, says Garcia, is that “Laserfiche is the foundation of all of it.”

To get the process underway, Garcia and the Clerk’s Office team began by setting up an E-mail Project Records Committee of stakeholders, including departmental managers, to ensure that the town’s Laserfiche records management system met enterprise needs. “We knew that the information in Laserfiche had to be useful to everyone,” she says, “so we made sure that everyone was involved from the beginning. That way we could make sure everyone’s needs were met.”

Ironically, that meant that Garcia herself had to look at what would make everyone as comfortable using Laserfiche as she was. “It took a lot of trial and error to craft a records management plan that was flexible,” she admits. “As the Town Clerk, I knew the code pursuant to the state’s record series and schedule. But Laurie Capek, our administrative assistant, actually pointed out that when she would look things up, she would go beyond the code and find a keyword,” Garcia explains. Accordingly, the town came up with its own system—“PW” for Public Works, “FIN” for Finance, etc. —that everyone could recognize and use. In fact, notes Capek, “This system sets up a level of transparency, even amongst ourselves.”

Under the town’s new records management plan, e-mails would only be kept for 90 days. Town staff then makes a determination based on training by the Clerk’s Office and the State Records Retention Manual if the document is required to be saved. Then, it’s simply moved into Laserfiche, where state-mandated retention schedules are applied.

The integration between Laserfiche and Outlook, where e-mails can be sent directly to the Laserfiche repository from Outlook and metadata can be auto-populated for imported Outlook e-mails, has been instrumental to the system’s effectiveness as a data governance and risk management tool. “My favorite thing about Laserfiche is its integration with Microsoft Outlook,” says IT Technician David Blincoe. “The attributes are easy to setup on an enterprise basis and the e-mail template can be used to easily save the metadata from each e-mail.”

Garcia says users like that this personalization means that they don’t have to change the way they’re used to working in Outlook. “The best thing about this is that, even from within Laserfiche, the document opens as an Outlook document; people can even send e-mails and they’re automatically saved in Laserfiche,” Garcia says. “The e-mail is now filed and stored with all the accessibility, functionality and ease of use that Laserfiche provides.”

The system has also proven itself easy to use, for users and IT alike. When a user deletes a document, it goes to the Recycle Bin, where Blincoe and Garcia can review it before deleting it permanently. If there are any questions or missing documents, Blincoe uses Audit Trail to track them down.

Ultimately, Blincoe is impressed with how easy Laserfiche is to administer. “Lisa and her staff really haven’t needed too much technical assistance,” he says.

The Avante Advantage

This year, Florence is implementing a Laserfiche Avante ECM/BPM solution, which will eventually equip each user with their own Laserfiche account, just as they already have their own Outlook e-mail account.

Garcia says she is looking forward to deploying Workflow business process management—included in the town’s new Avante system—to further automate contract management. “We’re already using Laserfiche to run reports to tell us when a contract is up for renewal,” she explains. “Now we’ll be able to have automatic e-mail notification when a contract is available.”

But even now, the benefits of using Laserfiche are many: Town-wide adoption of Laserfiche for records management ensures both compliance and transparency while it saves the Clerk’s Office staff time and resources. Across departments, paperwork has been reduced while continuity of operations is ensured. But really, Garcia, says, the lasting impact of Laserfiche is that the town has found a new and better way to work. The Planning Department, for instance, has already moved its files to Laserfiche. This saves storage costs, but also gives staff the ability to do their own research. “It’s a big deal to be able to just click on a contract from your desktop to see it, as opposed to how it used to be – submitting an internal request to us and having a five-day turnaround time while you waited for the hard copy,” Garcia says.

“Knowledge is power and we provide everyone with the same power. Better still, says Garcia, “We’re truly doing more with less. The Clerk’s Office has not had to hire more staff, and we’re providing tools so people can do their jobs better.”

Garcia says other smaller municipalities can learn from Florence’s example. “We would have loved to be the community that could go out and buy everything in one shot, but we started slow and showed the users what benefits they would receive through using Laserfiche and built on that foundation. Now both administration and elected officials feel confident investing in Laserfiche because our Clerk’s Office has such a proven track record,” she offers.

And Garcia and staff in Florence are always looking for new things to do with Laserfiche, even without a formal monitoring and evaluation plan. “We know what we’ve done so far, but we’re always looking at what else we can do, especially now that we have Workflow and we can begin automating more and more business processes,” Garcia says.

“Our motto is ‘Love Laserfiche.’ We want to make it so easy and convenient that people are so enthusiastic that they come to us with their ideas for how they can use it. That’s what our long term goal is—to have everyone as in love with Laserfiche as we are.”

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.

As these seasonal influxes fueled Vail’s local economy and luxury real estate market, they also highlighted a need for the town to address the resulting challenges to its infrastructure. By 2007, town administrators looked for ways to lessen municipal government’s footprint on the mountain community. An idea from years prior had by now developed into a need: conducting government with less paper. “We were at the point where we had so much paper, it was either build a warehouse or go electronic,” Wolfe explains. “Vail real estate is so expensive; you really can’t build a warehouse in the valley.”

When Wolfe joined the town in April 2007, he was encouraged that its records manager position was an IT one. “Business technology and information management are enough of a priority that the Content Manager is part of the IT group. It seemed logical given our overall goals for greater reliance on automated tools and the establishment of an electronic records management system,” he explains. “So often, when IT takes on the task without adequate content management, the result is an electronic black hole that corresponds to the former paper black hole.”

With technical support for the idea, Wolfe began to develop staff support as well. “Each department had one or two people who dealt with records and were interested in making some changes. I worked with them to look at applications.” After a needs assessment and departmental demonstrations by Laserfiche reseller Jen Harris of Peak Performance Imaging Solutions, Wolfe and the record custodians chose Laserfiche.

In addition to the great support from Peak Performance, he cites both ease of use and flexibility of administration as deciding factors.

“Laserfiche is an application easily managed by someone in a non-IT position. The security and other administrative elements of the application are easy to administer,” Wolfe explains. “We could provide tight security to anything we didn’t want disclosed, such as social security numbers and other PII, as well as broad access to other town departments and eventually, to the public.”

In July 2007, implementation began with the scanning of clerk’s records and the conversion of Human Resources PDF images from a legacy imaging system to TIFF files, which Wolfe notes “made it a lot easier to search and a lot easier to add pages to later.”

With his strong background in nuclear and legal records management, Wolfe made it a point to establish quality guidelines and procedures for storing content in the new system. “In Colorado you can replace paper with electronic records if you follow certain guidelines. The Colorado Municipal Retention Schedules were developed for the paper environment, but they apply regardless of media. Vail had actually done a pretty good job of managing paper records in accordance with municipal retention schedules, so our job was really just taking the right next steps to better management in an electronic environment.”

Wolfe set up the Laserfiche Records Management Module using retention schedule numbers mirrored in the e-folder structure. “The records management structure reflects the retention requirements, while the document management side mirrors the Town’s organizational structure and the paper world,” he says. “So it’s easy to check the records management folders, click on the Record Series Properties and update retention information as the State schedules are updated.”

By April 2008, several other departments began their respective pushes to reduce paper volumes. The progress was steady and growing. “We have 105 users in about a dozen departments,” he says. Now, Human Resources and Risk Management are completely paperless, the Clerk’s office uses Laserfiche to publish municipal agendas and town council minutes, while Community Development, Legal, Public Works, Fleet Management, the Fire Department and Finance staff have all been accessing the system in various capacities.

The holiday season in Vail

“One of the future challenges is to change work processes, creating efficiencies with an increase in document sharing,” Wolfe says. “We’re doing a lot with paper we could be doing in Laserfiche. But we also know how important it is to build a comfort level with people and their ability to access records in Laserfiche. When they see how much time they can save, it builds confidence and they’re ready to make the next step.”

For their next step, departments are eyeing various ways to automate how information is gathered, updated and, most importantly, used. “We want to do more to save user time in Community Development. We use Accela’s Permits Plus, and we’d like to populate selected data into our Laserfiche ‘Building Activities’ template,” Wolfe says.

Other integrations in the planning stages include a link between Laserfiche and the Public Works fleet management application. “We are just beginning to examine the fleet management application and, if possible, would like to send reports directly to Laserfiche,” says Wolfe.

And, inspired by nearby Aspen, Community Development is also eyeing a GIS integration to, as Wolfe puts it, “drill down further” into their records. “Our GIS operator liked what Aspen is doing and would like to able to access Laserfiche documents in Community Development, the Town Clerk’s office, Public Works and other departments using GIS and parcel numbers,” he adds.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been some very real tangible progress already. “We’ve been trying to build up our volume of records to make the system more powerful and useful – like it is to HR already,” Wolfe says. “We have over 42,000 documents, which consist of 1.7 million TIFF files weighing in at 189 GB and 12,300 electronic documents which include PDFs and Microsoft Office documents totaling 114 GB in Laserfiche at this time,” he adds.

“From a paper management perspective, we’ve been able to destroy 664 boxes of records. We scanned 364 boxes of backfiles and got rid of 300 boxes of duplicates and records beyond retention. We even built out a couple of offices from the saved space,” he adds.

The real benefits of Laserfiche, he’s found, are the ongoing ones. “The most savings come from recovering staff time. For example, Open Records Requests that used to take two weeks and many photocopies to fill can now be addressed in minutes by looking up the information in Laserfiche and posting the response via WebLink or sending an e-mail.”

Scenic view of the Gore Range from Blue Sky Basin at dawn.

This has done more than make existing staff more efficient, Wolfe says, it’s actually lessened government’s footprint in the townspeople’s eyes.

“Laserfiche helps us create a situation where we’re not growing staff and, over time, the existing staff will be able to do more because they have better tools. You’re touching on goals the community has – even finding parking for municipal employees can become an issue.

“The broader community is very diversified with second home owners from all over the world, so that’s the next step. The longer term goal is to get information out there and available on the Town website for residents,” he adds.

But even now, the system serves the informational needs for life safety officers regarding locations and traffic re-direction during seasonal celebrations. “Our Special Events Coordinator can post event permits which include street closures and barricades on WebLink,” Wolfe explains. “Officers used to have to paw through files to get the right wad of paper. Now our naming convention is by day and event, so officers can just call up the information via the Town’s Wi-Fi network and review the actual permit right in their vehicle.”

Usefulness to law enforcement is also driving Vail’s next project: bringing the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office onboard to store case photos in Laserfiche with an integration into its Intergraph public safety system. “We just purchased an additional repository and the Laserfiche Software Development Kit (SDK),” Vail IT Director Ron Braden says. “Once we beta the Sheriff’s Office, we will bring all our law enforcement agencies on board.”

The way W. Alondo McClees, Laserfiche Luminary and leader of the Technology Systems Team for the Norfolk Commissioner of Revenue, explains it, he and his colleagues were just “filling a need” when he and users from three other Virginia municipalities (Fredericksburg, Hanover and Charlottesville) first initiated a statewide Laserfiche user group for their Commissioner of Revenue offices at a 2007 regional conference.

“After our initial meeting near Richmond, there were a few of us on the same page—like Bev Rosato [from Frederick County] and Amy Johnson [from Hanover],” McClees says. “It’s like that line in ‘Robots’: ‘See a need, fill a need’: ‘You’re using Laserfiche? We are too! Let’s try to get together,’” he recalls.

Laserfiche reseller Unity Business Systems (UBS) saw the value of establishing user groups throughout its service areas, and was soon helping with invite lists, as well as hosting quarterly conference calls between the user group leaders. “The calls let us provide updates on the happenings in our own user groups as well as feedback to UBS on what current and potential users of Laserfiche think about the product and its modules,” says McClees. “The user groups themselves give our reseller the opportunity to ask candid questions and get honest feedback from users who use the product in an everyday, real-world setting. We’ve been able to give immediate and direct feedback to both Laserfiche and UBS about proposed ideas, events and the software itself. This is something that any organization would be hard-pressed to acquire through an e-mail or phone call. It’s just a great platform to share ideas.”

Sharing great ideas, of course, is ultimately what user groups are all about—which has proven even more valuable to the Laserfiche-curious. “We’ve been able to include offices that are not using Laserfiche, but wanted to know more about its true impact in a real-world setting,” says McClees. “We get people asking for references because they hear about the user group.” He remembers a recent call from the Virginia Port Authority. “They asked us a lot about Laserfiche and how we’d been using it,” McClees remembers. He must have left a good impression; the Virginia Port Authority just last week announced its decision to choose Laserfiche as its enterprise content management system over 27 other vendors.

“What started out as a user group for a small niche of Virginia municipalities has grown to include every industry: medical, financial, legal, clerical, religious and others,” he says. “We’re not only seeing attendance from people who already have Laserfiche, but also from people who are curious about the software or who are getting ready to implement it and want to know what to expect.”

Norfolk itself, ironically enough, finds itself among the latter as it prepares to upgrade to Records Management Edition (RME) and version 8.1 this month.

“Seeing other folks using RME has helped us figure out what we need to do before it even gets here,” McClees says. “One thing we learned is that we don’t have to redo our folder structure—we can use shortcuts and still have people find documents. So it’s the best of both worlds: business as usual, but with that solid, secure records management.”

“Every time we see a demo, everything seems that much more accessible—it takes the fear out of it, because it’s not that different from what we’re already doing,” he adds.

But the value to the Laserfiche community as a whole, McClees says, is unique and beyond compare. “Users and organizations face two challenges when budgets are tight and people don’t have a lot of time to research new products,” he observes. “First, they’re jaded by bad experiences with other software, so they might miss out on the message of a product that could truly fit their needs. Secondly, there’s usually a poor network of support within and between organizations that are using similar products.”

With revenues falling short, conferences and training can be cut from a budget. Set against this backdrop, McClees notes, the Virginia user group phenomena becomes even more necessary and relevant to success stories, beginning with individuals, spreading to the group and then back to the organizations they serve.

“I can’t think of another software product that has a community attached to it. There are many enterprise-level products that have user groups, but they don’t seem to have a community,” McClees says. “When I talk to people at a Laserfiche user group, I’m talking to my friends. We all care about how each other’s organizations are succeeding. It’s more than people getting together talking about software. When people see what we are doing, they want to be a part of it.”

And perhaps the greatest testament to the power of the Virginia user groups and Hampton Roads in particular, is how much the user groups have become part of the greater Laserfiche culture. “We continue to share ideas such as partnering with Laserfiche to help create user group logos, acquire space on the Laserfiche forums area of the Support site, and update the entire Laserfiche community on our progress through the use of Luminary blog posts,” McClees says. “We also have a Hampton Roads User Group Google Site for the purpose of disseminating documents, updating our users on our upcoming events and activities, and to advertise what we do—without clogging e-mail boxes.”

But for McClees, Laserfiche’s true value comes not just from its community, but from its ease of support: “We’re in an industry with a steadily decreasing workforce. Government IT people are retiring and they’re not immediately being replaced due to budgetary constraints. So it’s really important that we don’t have to spend 50% of our time looking over our shoulders at an application. Being able to quickly go into the administration console to do auditing is a Laserfiche tool I really appreciate. The security is robust and important—for example, I lock down people’s ability to e-mail records that are restricted by Virginia code.

“I look at Laserfiche like it’s just one less thing I have to worry about, and that’s critical to me.”

Meanwhile, Town Council member Bill Sibbing had the idea to do something about the amount of paper Council members received each week, as well as the storage and staff costs to file it and then decipher just which paperwork needed to be schlepped back and forth between meetings. Sibbing contacted Christine Curtis, Assistant Town Manager, about adopting a paperless system that could archive files, interconnect information between departments and manage each department’s information. Curtis created a committee to move the plan forward.

Curtis learned the Town actually already had an underused Laserfiche installation, now a decade old, that could do just that. Curtis discussed the idea of reinvigorating it with Smith who, remembering her time at the Laserfiche Conference, contacted Indiana reseller Nancy Mathes of Paper-Lite. Mathes had worked with Smith’s friend in Carmel, and over the next month or so, Smith gathered information to assist with moving forward with a like-minded program in Brownsburg. “I kind of beat up Nancy for information,” she jokes.

A month later the Committee’s research had inspired a town-wide “Go Green” initiative centered around an enterprise Laserfiche deployment. “We are so busy with such a small staff that we’re looking for ways to do more with less,” Curtis says. “We thought Laserfiche could be one of the tools.”

A Laserfiche Committee was formed, consisting of Smith, Curtis and Sibbing, as well as Planning Technician Jon Blake and IT Director Pete Palanca. Its first task was to make Council meetings paperless. As Curtis notes, “Those packets literally represented hundreds and hundreds of hours of staff time and effort.”

Blake redesigned the Council Room desk to accommodate an additional 12 monitors and additional hardware for each member to access their computer during the Boards and Commissions meeting, an engineering feat, notes Smith, that had the bonus effect of making members more visible to the public because the original monitors were lowered. Score one for transparent government.

For her part, Mathes presented her paperless solution in a way that was likewise transparent—one that didn’t demand that council members change their way of working. “They didn’t want a link to an agenda, they wanted their own copies of the agenda delivered to them that they could mark up and use at the meeting just like they were used to doing with the paper packets,” Mathes explains. Using Laserfiche Workflow, she showed Brownsburg council staff how to prepare and route individual files containing the agenda packet. And with that, Brownsburg’s “Go Green” initiative had its engine. “That council meeting really was the first driving force to the whole Town using Laserfiche,” says Curtis.

The Laserfiche Committee mapped out a three-phase implementation, first training department administrators in how to use Laserfiche, then training staff, with the idea to eventually push it out to the public and workers in the field via Web Access.

Installation began in July with Jessica Mathes of Paper-Lite holding week-long training sessions for Town staff in virtually every department, from Accounting and HR to Department of Public Works, regardless of their computer experience. Mathes also sat down with HR department staff to create templates and a folder structure. Plans are in place to automate the HR onboarding process with a custom workflow where individuals will fill out a form online to be sent to the Human Resources Coordinator, who then sends it to a department head for viewing – all while Audit Trail ensures that the documents remain confidential to manage liability and compliance risks.

But for the first real-time use of Laserfiche, just not having to make those 14 two-inch thick paper packets for the town’s August council meeting was enough. “Workflow was up and running,” Curtis says, “and we went live.” Now with all systems up and running, and the Council members comfortable with the transition, Council meetings will be completely paperless by October 22, 2009.

It is significant that the Town of Brownsburg’s success so far, as well as its future plans, owes as much to having active, enthusiastic internal champions – Smith, Curtis and Sibbing among them – as it does to having targeted improvable business processes where using Laserfiche can really shine. Like producing the Town’s newsletter, Curtis says. “Each department writes its own articles and adds its own pictures, even though they’re all in different buildings,” she explains. “That saves a lot of time and effort.”

Curtis admits Brownsburg’s use of Workflow is rudimentary so far, “because we had to move quickly on this,” she says. But she can already point to enterprise efficiencies – and savings – based on the Town’s investment in Laserfiche. Though the Town’s Boards and Commissions use just a single workflow, the Committee has already produced ROI figures that calculate Laserfiche will pay for itself in just 2 ½ years. “The ROI that was calculated was just for use with the Boards and Commissions going paperless, including what we’re spending now in staff time and supplies,” Curtis explains. “When we start adding additional licenses and using it more, we’re getting above and beyond what we originally expected in our ROI.”

At the same time, certain processes are quietly reaping the benefits of automation while fostering collaboration. “When we walk through our budget process, we’re working with all our charts and our documents. The budget committee can log in from home and see the latest budget being utilized,” offers Curtis. “It’s true interdepartmental sharing of information.”

Future projects include the Planning and Building department integrating Laserfiche with Laserfiche PDP partner Energov to link documentation from permits and blueprints and also create a custom Workflow that will allow builders and residents to submit permit applications and documents online, using Laserfiche not just to push information out to residents, but to pull it in as well —saving time and even generating revenue in the process.

Police Captain Jeff Gray is also looking into utilizing Laserfiche to move court-bound information to the Hendricks County Prosecutor’s Office via Workflow so that multiple drives across the county will no longer be necessary to deliver documents.

The possibilities are as endless as the cost savings are real. Now the challenge is keeping up with evolving scale of Laserfiche use, which now includes all town departments and a growing number of workstations. Until now, Smith, Curtis and Blake have administered the system internally. “Really it’s been a discussion of who can dedicate the time and interest,” Curtis explains. “We wouldn’t be where we are today without the help of Nancy and Jessica and Paper-Lite. We were lucky Wendi had a solid computer background and could take time to wear an additional hat.”

Now, to keep up with the town’s growing overall IT needs, including supporting Laserfiche, a new IT Technician, Adam Kirby, has been brought on board. Curtis adds that, just like Smith did last year, Kirby will be attending the Laserfiche Conference this January, although this time he’ll be going for work and not vacation—to get his own idea of just what Brownsburg can do with Laserfiche.

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.

So when City Clerk Diane Hermann-Brown says staying on top of Sun Prairie’s mounting paperwork was a city-wide problem, she literally means city-wide. “With all of our various departments that are off-site, it wasn’t just an issue of the time involved to retrieve the documents, but the time and resources involved in sending a clear, clean copy to the requesting party,” she says. “From the start our vision was to have a records management system where people could search, retrieve and print their own copies without ever leaving their work station.”

Hermann-Brown was inspired by a trip to an International Institute of Municipal Clerks conference—“that triggered the spark,” she says—to start investigating digital records management systems. After three years of requests, funding was approved in 2005. In early 2006, Laserfiche was chosen after reseller Cities Digital, Inc., outlined a three-phase implementation that first addressed simple search and retrieval needs.

The immediate goal, says Cities Digital’s Jessica Welsch, was to get the City Clerk’s, City Administrator’s and City Attorney’s offices, as well as the Planning and Finance departments, up and running with Laserfiche. At the same time, Cities Digital worked with city staff to implement best practices and efficiency-building techniques into their Laserfiche use. “We knew we were asking people to let go of their paper and work a little differently than they were used to,” says Welsch. “It’s easy for us to tell them their jobs were going to get easier, but we wanted to make sure we weren’t creating any new work for them by asking them to learn the software.”

From Hermann-Brown’s vantage point, the city’s new Laserfiche system had to meet three main goals:

1. Automate document management while maintaining a system of records management.
2. Meet compliance requirements regarding retention schedules with state auditors and regulators.
3. Scale to meet both the city’s growing number of users and extended uses of Laserfiche’s capabilities.

The first point presented an initial challenge: How to standardize the file folder structure and naming convention that would satisfy all the records requests that would come in through the Clerk’s Office? Hermann-Brown spent a lot of time meeting with department heads, then talking to staff that would be using the system. Next, a test group of users reviewed the various naming conventions that were used by the departments. “We had a lot of boxes,” Hermann-Brown laughs.

A consensus was going to be hard to come by, so Hermann-Brown says she put her foot down and a small group of Department Heads made the final decision on the naming conventions. The naming conventions would not only standardize records, but word processing documents as well, which, with so many different departments used to doing things their own way for so long, created resistance. “Sometimes you have to just make a decision which is in the best interest of all departments,” she says. “People had to change, but it wound up making things easier for them. Now that they’re using it, they see how it makes sense, because they can find things on their own—they don’t have to call up people in other departments when they’re searching for documents. In the end, it saves them a lot of time.” Establishing central control went a long way to enabling more productive departmental flexibility, she adds.

This was especially beneficial to the Finance Department. In fact, owing to the range of documents the department scanned (receipts, bills, check stubs), the standardized naming convention and document types enabled the advanced capture capabilities of Quick Fields to automate much of the hand-keying and filing that staff used to labor over. Now, finance staff prints all of its reports from its General Ledger to Laserfiche and scans all of their Accounts Payable documents, while staff from other departments can retrieve their own past invoices, payment checks and other documents, instead of requesting them from Finance staff.

Just in the Finance Department alone, six three-drawer filling cabinets were sent packing, which freed up office space for additional personnel, which the department was able to hire, thanks to the savings from more efficient use of work hours. Now, finance staff can access vendor invoices immediately. It’s a vast improvement over a process that used to involve manual retrieval of records kept in a dark, disorganized basement.

City Auditors likewise have seen the added value of immediate and searchable access to documents and supporting paperwork. Auditors had to be sure the new software would integrate securely with their growing applications (they are currently in the middle of a MUNIS deployment). “Before any implementation of software in the Finance Department, we had to get it approved by our Auditors,” explains Jan Thomas, Deputy City Treasurer. Cities Digital had extensive experience with successful Laserfiche integrations, and after deployment, a backlog conversion added Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivables documents, banking statements, and financial records dating back to 2005 into Laserfiche.

The City’s 2007 audit was the first to use Laserfiche. “Oh did the auditors love it! Because we’d been scanning in our information from day one, we were able to audit our AP, AR, banking statements and financial records right from Laserfiche,” says Thomas.

The second phase of the city-wide deployment was to implement Agenda Manager in the Clerk’s, Planning and Finance departments to automate and simplify the multi-departmental, often multi-headache-inducing management of weekly and monthly meetings. Welsch and her Cities Digital team worked with the City to create role-based training documents that made it easy to get users performing their functions in Agenda Manager’s powerful interdepartmental workflow and agenda preparation and publishing tools.

“Agendas are very time-consuming, especially when you have four levels of approval like we do,” Hermann-Brown says. “We have ‘Agenda Fridays’ and we used to have to try to track people down on Friday afternoon to approve items and make changes. Now an administrator can be in a meeting, get an e-mail notification and send comments via e-mail to the individual preparing the agenda. Especially in a municipality our size, with so many layers of approval, it really saves a lot of time and effort not having to walk these big packets of paper around trying to find people.”

Hermann-Brown had a chance to preview the upcoming release of Agenda Manager 8 at this year’s IIMC conference. “It’s more user friendly and has more helpful features and processing options, which will make it a lot more advantageous and efficient for our users,” she says, referring to, among other new features, Agenda Manager 8’s new in-place document editing and enhanced notification capabilities. “It’s good to see that Laserfiche is still evolving Agenda Manager to meet the changing job and changing job requirements of our users.”

Hermann-Brown is cautious but optimistic about the coming year. “How are we going to respond to the needs of staff and public when it’s hard to convince the city council to spend money on technology when budget funding will be very challenging—even when what’s needed to improve service might cost the taxpayers some money?” she asks. “Residents have higher expectations for a responsive government then they did 10 years ago, but they also do not want to see spending increased.”

With Laserfiche, she feels her local government is responding to the residents needs efficiently, as well as being financially accountable. And thanks to Laserfiche, everyone’s needs are being met.

These days, however, an officer responding to the same call can pull up reports right in their patrol car, accessing information vital to the safety of the EDP – and the public – using just a name, incident number or other simple keyword.

It’s this kind of progressive approach to information and process management that’s transformed the Hamilton Police Service from a command-and-control police model to a community-based-and-problem-solving service over the last decade. As HPS Records Supervisor Gary Holden puts it, “Laserfiche has allowed us to spend more time in the community and less time travelling back and forth to the station.”

But this progressive approach had to begin somewhere, and it started in 2000 when IT Manager Ross Memmlo began investigating document management to alleviate storage costs and repurpose valuable office space. Franz Gangl of Laserfiche reseller IKON Office Solutions demonstrated Laserfiche’s information management capabilities for Memmolo, IT Administrator Diana Scime, Shari Moore and Holden.

Holden says they chose Laserfiche based on four criteria:

• Business Functionality: “It needed to be really user-friendly, no matter how comfortable staff were with computers. Our reseller showed us an example of an agency about our size using a system similar in size and capacity to our proposal.”
• System Architecture: “The flexibility and expandability to allow for future development and integration was important.”
• Organization/Support Training: “We knew whenever we had a question, all we had to do was make that call to the 1-800 number.”
• Project Schedule: “According to our funding cycler, the system needed to be up and running by year’s end.”

Working with IKON, Memmlo planned a phased implementation that would begin with current reports, advance to backlog conversion, and finally establish Web access for officers and staff. Phase I began in fall 2002, scanning current incident reports and Motor Vehicle Collision (MVC) reports.

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In early 2002, the implementation team developed “banner pages” to enable Quick Fields to index various reports, which helped with a massive backlog conversion project that would eventually add 860,000 images to the system. “We were able to scan anything and everything – photographs, willsays, handwritten notes – into folders,” says Holden. By 2004, the Laserfiche repository held over 300,000 active and historical incident reports, DNA records, MVC reports, pardon files and sudden death reports.

“One challenge we faced was reworking our existing paper processes,” explains Holden. “Many of our serious offences needed to be disseminated to many different officers and divisions. The new process had to ensure the report was coded according to Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, then scanned, entered on the Canadian Police Information Center (CPIC) system and reassigned for further investigation. The process changed how our Records Business Centre handled the reports.” To remedy the situation, Holden created a color-coded folder system staff use to process reports prior to scanning.

Quick Fields’ automated indexing also helped Holden to standardize the record keeping process, which, along with Laserfiche’s fuzzy search capabilities, has almost completely eradicated misfiling. “If a report is improperly indexed, we simply run a search to locate it within the database,” explains Holden.

This search capability has become especially empowering to police officers. “Optical Character Recognition (OCR) allows the front-line officer to glean valuable information from reports that wasn’t possible in the past,” Holden says.

“If an officer wants to know more about a rash of Breaking & Enterings where all he knows is a red pick-up that has a unique decal on the side door was involved, he can use Laserfiche search to look up other reports,” he adds. “We can’t possibly index every piece of information within a police report, but OCR and fuzzy search addresses that problem, making it a valuable investigative tool.”

It has become even more valuable since Hamilton deployed Laserfiche WebLink in 2004. Police Chief Brian Mullan, responding to a need for heightened police presence, realized he didn’t necessarily need to hire more officers if officers spent less time looking for paperwork. Holden explains. “With Internet access to the Laserfiche repository, officers can view police reports on their MDT [mobile data terminal],” he says. “It’s effectively made our cruisers an extension of our Records Management System (RMS). They can search five historical reports right away without linking.”

Adds Holden, “The ability to view active missing person photos or photographs of lost or stolen property is critical when locating a missing youth on the street or locating previously stolen property.”

For 2009-2010, the HPS Laserfiche team plans to expand Laserfiche to Hamilton’s Human Resources and Legal departments, but not before answering concerns about employee confidentiality and security rights.

For support, Holden looked to the Laserfiche Police User Groups he’s been attending for three years. “I knew York Police Service used Laserfiche in its HR department, so I thought, ‘Why re-invent the wheel?’ I asked them about their implementation and training process and what worked.” Based on what he learned, Holden formulated his own strategy, highlighting the ability to assign multi-layer security to employee records in transit, the ability for assigned HR staff to view documents from their desktop, as well as reducing paper files and better controlling retention.

The three patrol divisions in the City of Hamilton.

“We have three separate divisions. Laserfiche will allow yearly performance reviews to be shipped electronically between offices,” he explains. “It’s easy to understand Laserfiche as a simple storage repository, but you can move things around so you’re actually managing active records. The security capabilities of Laserfiche were a huge benefit for me to ensure confidentiality during this process, because I could assign rights that allowed a user to browse a report but not open it. They’d be directed to see the proper authority to obtain a copy of the report where necessary, which facilitated our disclosure processes.”

The ability to redact sensitive information was also key to the Records Business Center’s ability to process disclosures to the Courts and outside agencies. “The redaction ability of Laserfiche is by far, one the greatest assets to address these needs,” Holden says. “We used to copy our reports—twice—then black out the information and then copy the vetted version again. Redacting in Laserfiche saved us a fortune in paper and time. We also use stamping and sticky note annotations to address disclosure/non-disclosure issues and verification/validation processes of ongoing police investigations.”

It wasn’t until Holden could show that Laserfiche Audit Trail would ensure the integrity of legal documents that the Crown [District] Attorney signed on. “I had meetings with the Crown Attorney to ensure them there were no legal issues producing these documents as evidence in court,” Holden remembers. “We discussed the quality of the images and how we’d be using Audit Trail to confirm when a document was scanned or modified. We were ultimately able to scan in every document—except for witness statements, which they requested to remain in their original paper form.”

Ultimately, the Hamilton Police Service has realized a significant amount of savings by using Laserfiche to refine its business processes:

• $200,000 saved annually, due to downsizing 4 civilian staff in the Records Business Centre, as officers are able to access vital information directly.
• Officers spend more time in the community because they no longer need to attend Central Station to view reports.
• Clerks save time, because they no longer need to locate reports and read them to officers over the phone.
• Valuable floor space has been reclaimed from paper storage.
• Redacting documents in Laserfiche saves “a fortune in paper and time,” as Holden puts it, helping staff more easily meet file requests from the Courts and outside agencies.

• Spring 2002: The Project Team chooses Laserfiche.
• Fall 2002: Phase I begins. Staff start scanning in current incident reports and Motor Vehicle Collision (MVC) reports.
• 2003: Indexing is automated with Quick Fields. Backlog conversion of historical occurrence reports (860,000 images) takes 30 weeks.
• 2004: Phase I is successfully finished, with over 300,000 records and reports scanned into the system. Phase II begins. When it is finished, every officer and designated civilian will have direct access to Laserfiche through the Internet.
• 2009: Web access expands Laserfiche access to 120 additional users, including officers in their patrol cars.
• 2010: The Police Laserfiche Team plans to expand use to Human Resources and Legal Services departments.

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.

“Our objective is ‘Online, not in-line,’” says Michaud. “We had a vision of public documents available 24/7 without ever having to wait in line again.” Now all they needed was a way to implement it.

In 2006, General Code Solutions Consultant Herb Myers demonstrated Laserfiche for city staff, prompting Saco’s IT Department to choose Laserfiche. Ease of use, scalability, “going green,” and establishing a portal for improved public service all factored into the decision. Myers, for one, was impressed. “I was amazed at how forward-thinking they were,” he says. “They wound up teaching me as much as I taught them.”

With the foresight and commitment of both IT and Michaud that, as Myers puts it, “’green’ starts with technology,” Myers and IT mapped out an implementation strategy in meticulously planned phases (see sidebar).

Saco’s initial roll-out called for multi-departmental implementation almost immediately, which prompted the appointment of Laserfiche Luminary Fran Beaulieu as the in-house Laserfiche Administrator. Beaulieu underwent what Myers and the City refer to as “’train the trainer’ training.”

Beaulieu admits progress was slow, owing to the need to assess each department’s willingness, as she puts it, “to let go of the paper.” Key to ensuring user buy-in, she says, was not so much dictating a way of doing things, but establishing a standard by “planning with each department’s staff, hearing their needs and wants, and helping lead the way.” This included weekly meetings, discussions of how to avoid duplicating files and coming up with a consensus of what would be the “logical place” to centralize information. “Some visualized immediate benefits, others required a bit more help in the vision,” she says.

This help began with all Administrative Assistants—Beaulieu dubbed them “power users”—training on the Laserfiche client for importing and scanning documents. Department Heads learned how to use the system via Web Access. “I sat down with them one-on-one and made sure they felt comfortable with what I was showing them before I left.”

Beaulieu also worked with the Assessing Department, one of the City’s biggest paper users, to import deeds into Laserfiche. “Once they were able to see the speed of a search and ease of use, they became my highest achievers,” she adds. “The Assessor’s Department has almost completely added a deed for every parcel within the city for constituents to view and access.”

Beaulieu used this experience to identify and standardize procedures and file structure in creating the City’s all-important Document Management Manual (DMM). Beaulieu’s committee determined that the addition of folders, renaming of documents and deletion of documents would be done only by Laserfiche Administrators.

Trainings were limited to certain shift times, so, inspired by General Code’s own training Webinars, staff created a short “how-to” video for Web Access users along with a simple guide—customized using the file structure created by the City—available internally.

By April 2008, expanded training and more departmental buy-in paved the way for enterprise adoption and Phase 3 public access. Saco’s Department of Public Works and Wastewater were by now online via Web Access. And implementing Quick Fields enabled the Assessor’s Department to automatically scan and index Property Tax Cards where OCR had been formerly problematic and manually typing the information was, as Beaulieu puts it, “not an option.”

How effectively? “The process used to require approximately 2 to 2 1/2 days of printing time for one person to accomplish and used about a whole toner cartridge and 20 reams of copy paper,” Beaulieu says. “Now the cards will be downloaded into Laserfiche in a matter of minutes. This process will save time and money.”

The final frontier was to break down the fourth wall of government and push it out to the community. WebLink would allow public access to city documents through the “Find-A-Doc” interface, with a how-to video and on-line instructions leading the way. Roll-out took some time due to customization, but General Code’s Brian Hoody set-up quick search links to bring users directly to a specified folder, even getting audio files to work for the City’s Planning Department via the “Find-A-Doc” portal.

Saco's "Find-a-Doc" Public Web Portal

Though just a few months old, “Find-A-Doc” is already resonating with staff and citizens alike. Maggie Edwards, an Administrative Assistant in the Planning Department, admits to being “a little intimidated at first” by the Laserfiche system, but now shares in Saco’s vision of a successful portal strategy. “If there’s a subdivision or site plan you want to know about, you can view the entire files online. If you wish to hear an audio of the minutes from the Planning Board meetings, you may do so,” she says. “Laserfiche has made it very easy to maneuver.”

Saco’s savings so far total over $10,000 a year, but as Beaulieu points out, “We also look at the value of the system for not departments, but individual value to users. Service to constituents is a big factor.”

• Planning and Engineering saves $7,580 a year by scanning large format maps.
• Inspection Reports saves $1,780 and 1,335 sheets of paper a year.
• The Assessor’s Office saves over $1,600 a year.

And now with the economy forcing municipalities to do more with less, neighboring Scarborough has requested a look at Saco’s Document Management Manual while other budget-strapped cities are investigating sharing services to access various documents and parcel information. Saco is also looking into integrating Laserfiche with its GIS application. “We’re already sharing some personnel so the idea of shared services and ‘umbrella IT’ makes sense,” Beaulieu says.

“The lines are so blurred in areas like road repair that regional administration makes the most sense,” she adds. “When you can see what documents are attached to parcels, that saves you phone calls and extra trips and that makes their life easier as well as ours.”

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.

“That same year, we got a new Finance Director. We’ll call her Brenda (not her real name),” Pilgrim explains. “We were having our second weekly meeting with her and she blurted out ‘We’re getting rid of Laserfiche.’ We were all shocked.”

Pilgrim took it upon himself to prove the system’s worth. He went into what he calls “stealth mode,” personally approaching other departments about stepping up their use of Laserfiche, tactfully earning their trust and answering their concerns along the way. Simply put, Laserfiche had its internal champion, but the software ultimately sold itself, user by user, process by process, department by department.

Albany, OR, Network Administrator Allen Pilgrim

“Most people were fearful of losing their precious paper. I sat down in meetings with people and just one on one made it clear that I was committed to ensuring the safety of their data,” Pilgrim explains. “As we progressed, people saw the evidence that I was serious.”

The Building division in Community Development was interested, for instance, but thought Laserfiche was limited to just the Finance Department. Pilgrim pointed out the annual maintenance had been moved to the IT budget, leaving Laserfiche open for intra-office adoption.

“What happened next was nothing short of amazing,” Pilgrim says. “The Building division latched onto Laserfiche as if it was the greatest thing they had ever seen.” Building’s Allison Liesse began scanning all day, every day, eventually working with Pilgrim to purchase a wide-format scanner. IT Staff even came up with interface integration with the city’s Accela PermPlus permitting software so that building inspectors could retrieve Laserfiche documents through the application. Within a year, storage jumped from 10 to 42 4.6GB volumes. Now, inspired both by Building’s success and Pilgrim’s handling of the implementation, Albany’s Planning division has come on board just this year.

Around the same time, Paul Jacobson in the Public Works Engineering division was interested in Laserfiche. Pilgrim was able to, as he puts it, “give him an area in Laserfiche to play with.” Jacobson’s experience inspired his whole department to convert to using Laserfiche. “There was no longer any talk of getting rid of Laserfiche because it had become too valuable to the City and more people were using it all the time.”

By 2006, Pilgrim convinced Albany’s IT Director to add Laserfiche as a standard install on every computer in the city. Pilgrim notes that by then, IT was independent from the Finance Department – and that “Brenda” had since moved on.

In 2008, the police department requested a demo. “They fell in love with the product,” Pilgrim says – and he was soon requesting two high-end scanners and training several PD employees. Concurrently, Pilgrim implemented Quick Fields. Police reports are now completely automated with Quick Fields. “They just drop them into the scanner and they’re done,” explains Pilgrim. Planning has since come on board; by now Public Works was now doing all of their projects in Laserfiche. Ambulance Billing has become, as Pilgrim puts it “another Quick Fields success story.” Operations also started doing more with Laserfiche.

Quick Fields, Quicker ROI

Pilgrim worked with Albany’s new (post-“Brenda”) Finance Director to approve the purchase and implementation of Quick Fields following a demo last year by reseller Michael Dane of VPCI. “We determined it would be perfect for four departments and the benefits have been spectacular,” Pilgrim says.

1. Allison Liesse in Building says it has saved her literally hundreds of hours of work – it saves her four hours a month processing timesheets alone.
2. Ambulance Billing reports are automatically processed by Quick Fields, which saves “dozens upon dozens” of hours.
3. For the Police Department, automatically processing thousands and thousands of police reports has been the biggest benefit of the city’s Quick Fields implementation. The failure rate is less than 1%. “Changing the slashes in the dates to dashes made all the difference,” Pilgrim notes. “Basically they just drop a stack of reports in the scanner and their job is done.”

The Future

Already in 2009, Pilgrim has done demos for staff of the Municipal Court, which has since started using the system, as well as to Albany’s Fire Department. The City Manager’s office and the HR Department are the latest additions, while the Parks & Recreation Department is slowly but surely adopting their own system. And all of Purchasing’s paperwork is stored in Laserfiche. “Most recently our GIS division had me set it up so they could move all of their As-Builts into Laserfiche,” adds Pilgrim.

Besides efficient (and satisfied) city employees in virtually every department, 2009 marks another Laserfiche milestone: the City of Albany will be only the third city in Oregon to launch “Digital Image as Original” (DIO). This will allow the city to maintain digital copies for many of our records,” explains Pilgrim. “This will allow us to lead the way on being more green, because it’s fun being green.” And as Albany has proved, Brendas of the world be darned, it’s fun being efficient, too.

Register for the “Laserfiche for Local Government = ECM + BPM” Webinar and learn more.

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

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.”

In a world where government bureaucracy is the norm, the Marshall collaboration’s streamlined operations are a remarkable accomplishment which is earning national acclaim—and in an arguably unexpected part of the world.

Marshall, a quiet prairie town, is 40 miles from the nearest interstate and 200 miles from Minneapolis. Yet in the late 1990s, a forward thinking group of residents and elected officials calling themselves “Prairie Net” vowed the information superhighway was going pass a lot closer than Interstate 29 in South Dakota. Monthly meetings were held, resolutions were passed, grants were received and bonds were issued. And with official commitment clear and money in hand, Marshall soon had ISP providers waiting to wire up the community. It took a few years but eventually a brand new fiber optic cable stretched some 75 miles from Sioux Falls, SD, down every street in Marshall.

Next step was deciding what to do with that cable. Prairie Net knew it was crucial to provide Web access to serve the whole community, including residents, government and businesses alike. And they knew Laserfiche was going to play a large part in it, they just weren’t sure how to go about it. That’s where planning came in.

“It’s all about planning and having the group meetings where we all talk about our road map for this system and how to plan on using Laserfiche down the road,” Pickthorn says. “We knew that having that new fiber optic cable in place opened a lot of opportunities to us.”

It was in those meetings that the idea surfaced to have a shared document management system connected by the new cable. Prairie Net recognized that different government agencies were responsible for similar tasks in their respective offices—and that duplication of effort would be eliminated by having all their records maintained in a single location.

Bringing four distinct government operations together under one IT roof was no small task. City Hall and the city’s utilities already shared a Laserfiche system, while the school district and county had their own systems. The district decided to merge their system with the city’s, and the county followed suit soon after. With an enterprise Laserfiche system encompassing the four different agencies, staff were able to share ideas on its construction, upkeep and expansion.

“Each entity had its own unique challenges on how they wanted to organize and store their data,” Pickthorn says. “We were able to take the efficiencies we learned through working with multiple schools and apply them to city government and municipal utility operations. We’ve been able to take things we’ve learned through experience, such as file naming conventions and standardization, and apply them throughout the system.”

“In a big city it would be very difficult to get something like this done, simply due to the politics involved,” says Clayton Baer, software designer for Marshall’s Laserfiche reseller Crabtree Companies.

Not to say that there hasn’t been opposition, including intervention by the courts when one judge questioned the legality of the collaboration, says Marshall’s City Director Harry Weilage. However, the system’s success has won over most of the skeptics.

“The last departments in the various agencies that wanted to get into this technology were the financial departments,” Pickthorn says. “Now, it’s staff in those departments who use Laserfiche the most.”

For the four agencies, sharing a single enterprise system means that costs are managed more easily. According to Pickthorn, a single IT staff member is able to serve three of the four different agencies. And with one large system instead of four smaller ones, there is also considerable savings on costs.

“The initial investment is one-quarter of the price,” says Baer. “That was probably the biggest selling point when it came to getting grants. Why would we build four separate infrastructures when we could just build one? They all serve the same taxpayers.”

This cooperative approach is appealing to more than just grant issuers. National computer experts Daniel Pink and Daniel Tascot accepted invitations to review the Marshall system and were duly impressed, says Weilage. There has also been plenty of local attention, particularly through a program that recruited developmentally disabled residents to undertake some of the scanning needed to get the original paper documents into digital format.

All the attention has helped spread similar collaborations among government agencies in other parts of the state, Weilage adds. In Anoka County, 11 different police departments all use a county-wide enterprise Laserfiche system. Ditto for the 10 school districts in Northeast Metro 916 Intermediate School District.

“Where this might be too expensive in another rural school district, Northwest was able to manage it because they all worked together to create a system that serves the entire school district,” Baer says.

Right now, Marshall is in the most ambitious phase of its IT infrastructure project. The Marshall Portal, as it’s being called, is a multi-media interactive website with links to every organization and agency in town. Prairie Net now wants to upload the various Laserfiche repositories onto that portal, so town employees will be able to access their work documents from home and students and taxpayers alike will be able to research public records.

“We want to offer one-stop access to information, whether it’s local government, school district or county government records,” Weilage says. “The Marshall portal will offer quick and easy access to all the information we have in Laserfiche. Whether a resident is looking for sports schedules, meeting minutes or to sign up for little league, it will all be there.”

Marshall has more than its residents in mind with its portal plans. This community of 12,500 hosts three billion-dollar industries—Archer Daniels Midland, Schwan Foods and US Bank—and having all this information on-line is going to be helpful for them as well, according to Weilage.

But ultimately, the benefit of Laserfiche is in how the community—of residents and staff alike—has embraced it.

“You can spend as much as you want on new technology, but the key is getting the most out of it,” Weilage says. “That takes getting the community to take advantage of it, and here, they are.”

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.”

With staff in 38 offices across the city’s 148 square miles, Bakersfield achieves a broad range of benefits.

“There’s no reason to limit Laserfiche to a single department or use,” he adds. “Using Laserfiche in all departments means we really achieve results.

“For example, our human resources department puts performance evaluations into Laserfiche. Our fire department has a HazMat folder that only department personnel have access to, so the locations of hazardous material won’t become public knowledge. But it’s available in Laserfiche to the fire crew 24/7, so they can know any potential danger at a fire site.”

Bakersfield, CA, IS Director Bob Trammell

According to Trammell, the city was recently asked to cooperate with the California Attorney General’s office, which was conducting a major probe into price fixing. Staff had to collect all purchase records that met certain pre-determined criteria. “This would have required a lot of city resources,” he says. “Instead, we set up the Attorney General’s office with a Laserfiche account so they could access and search the necessary records themselves—which saved a great deal of time for us.”

But besides using Laserfiche to eliminate paper and simplify information retrieval, Bakersfield has also expanded Laserfiche enterprise-wide by integrating it with the city’s ERP system, Sungard NaviLine, and their GIS system, ESRI ArcGIS.

Bakersfield uses Laserfiche as the foundation of an innovative program to combat graffiti, which Trammell believes wouldn’t be practical—or possible—without integrating Laserfiche and Sungard.

When a citizen reports graffiti, the city’s goal is to remove it within 24 hours. The graffiti removal crew uses the Sungard NaviLine Work Order module to record how much paint and time was required to remove the graffiti. Photographs of the graffiti are stored as JPEGs in Laserfiche and attached to the work order, so retrieving a work order also brings up photographs stored in Laserfiche.

Next, the Bakersfield Police Department analyzes the photographs stored in Laserfiche, recording repeated patterns as Laserfiche template field values. When police arrest a suspect, officers retrieve all recorded examples of their “work” from Laserfiche and use the Work Order module to calculate the cost of the graffiti removal. Then, the city files a civil lawsuit against the parents to recover cleanup costs.

“That’s a pretty good deterrent when you consider that the bill could add up to six figures,” says Trammell.

Prior to implementing this program, Bakersfield found itself in the situation of most cities—they would arrest a tagger and overcrowded courts would let the perpetrator out on probation until they were arrested again. “Civil suits are a much better deterrent,” Trammell says.

Given the success of the anti-graffiti program, Trammell and his staff plan to continue the city’s integration with Sungard. “We just finished bringing code enforcement online so that the department can store pictures of code violations in the system,” he says. “Our finance department is looking forward to storing invoices in the accounts payable section by next fiscal year. They already ‘cold-load’ auditing reports, storing them in Laserfiche instead of printing them out on paper, which means they’re searchable, so people can find them easily.”

But Bakersfield’s Sungard integration is just the start. The city has also fully integrated Laserfiche with their GIS system, ArcGIS from ESRI.

Downtown Bakersfield with City Hall and Police Headquarters at left and Hall of Records at right

“About 12 years ago, around the same time that we purchased Sungard and Laserfiche, we also purchased an ESRI system,” Trammell remembers. “We needed a good tool to provide GIS services to various city departments. Almost all the work the City does is related to GIS. It’s one of the cornerstones of our IT infrastructure.”

According to Trammell, almost every city department has used the ESRI GIS system, and, in fact, GIS was one of his main goals for building Bakersfield’s IT infrastructure. “I really felt that there needed to be three main components—ERP, document management and GIS. Once we selected Sungard, Laserfiche and ESRI, we began to look for ways to integrate them. With our ESRI system, we store documents in Laserfiche and, through integration, retrieve them spatially,” he says.

In the city’s ESRI system, users can select a parcel or area of the city and search Laserfiche for documents relating to that particular area. “They can retrieve documents ranging from AutoCAD drawings to planning documents to fire HazMat information to photographs, whatever we have in the system,” Trammell says.

The ESRI integration took only about two months to complete, with city IT staff performing all of the work themselves. Currently, Public Works is using the ESRI/Laserfiche integration, with the Fire Department, Police Department and Building Department all planning to use it in the near future. “It’s very useful, because staff can quickly find the information they need,” Trammell says.

With Laserfiche fully integrated into the city’s IT infrastructure, Bakersfield’s IT staff is striving to live up to the city’s motto, “Life as it should be,” both for city staff and residents. “Our residents like the ability to quickly search for documents without having to go to the City Clerk’s office,” Trammell says. “And our staff appreciates the ability to store their own documents for quick retrieval. For our IT staff, we find that Laserfiche requires very little support—which is very important to us.”

CSU Bakersfield's Walter Stiern Library

Trammell believes that all cities can find benefits in Laserfiche, so he does not hesitate to recommend it to colleagues. “With Laserfiche, you get more bang for the buck than with other imaging systems,” he says. “And when you make it available to all your city departments, not just the City Clerk, that’s when you really begin to realize the benefits.

“You really should look at integrating Laserfiche with your ERP and GIS systems, because once you’ve done an integration, you really find that there’s nothing to it,” he adds. “We’ve realized enormous benefits from integrating other applications with Laserfiche, and that’s why we anticipate even more success in the future.”

“Life before Laserfiche was full of frustration,” remembers Rosalind Collins, Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue and Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.

Collins was often as confused as the seasonal staff she’d hire to help keep up with the mounting file load. In the city’s personal property area, for instance, a two-index paper filing system meant records older than four years had to be hauled down to the basement. If active incoming documents related to a past tax year, they had to be stored with older records. Business licenses were shuffled between active files and archives when they closed, only to be moved back if the business re-opened—always with more and more paperwork. “You could have 15 years of license applications and papers,” Collins says. “Name order wasn’t that great so there was always confusion about indexing business names: by the last name of the proprietor or the trading name or the first name of the legal name?”

Rosalind Collins is the Laserfiche Administrator for the City of Charlottesville.

Retrieving information was even worse. “Trying to find things was the biggest frustration,” she says. “My desk was nearest to the filing cabinet room. I can’t tell you how many slammed drawers and expletives I heard on a daily basis!”

And the inefficiency of the city’s information management system bordered on the tragic. “It took all year to file our documents, so most of what you needed was in a big pile of ‘stuff to file.’ Some years, we had a full-time employee, bless her heart, she was over 90 years old and a sweet petite woman. I’ll never forget the image of her folded up on the floor between cabinets filing in the bottom drawers.”

The last straw was when the city was reminded the hard way it had no disaster back-up plan when a plumbing accident damaged the basement records room. “I knew there had to be a better way out there somewhere,” says Collins.

There was—Collins just had to find a way to fund it.

“They say ‘pick your battles’ and I chose this one,” she recalls. “It took me three years of lobbying every way and everyone I knew and becoming a general pain in the rear, but we finally were able to set up an intra-departmental team to choose a system and, even better, we had funding to implement it.”

A view of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s estate, from its gardens

Her team reviewed almost 15 bids. “Some of the biggest names with the biggest price tags weren’t even meeting our minimum requirements, but Laserfiche met them all and then some.” Collins had done her homework; what she envisioned the new system doing read like a list of signature Laserfiche features: “OCR, scalability, public web access, configurable indexing, ‘print to scan,’ the ability to use any scanner hardware and to integrate with other systems, the ability to automate workflow and add routing capabilities,” she says, leaving one to ponder what else she could possibly ask for.

But the question wasn’t “what?” but rather “how easily?” Again, the answer was Laserfiche. “We were especially interested in ease of use and its fast learning curve,” she says. “We wanted something that stored our images and data in non-proprietary formats—especially since we’d been burned with an imaging project before that put thousands of HR files into a system we could no longer get into!” Collins also liked Laserfiche’s other qualities, including its price. “We were impressed with the security, multiple indexing ability, configurability and ease of maintenance and to top it off, it was the lowest bid.”

A pilot implementation in the city included five departments. The Commissioner of the Revenue’s office started day-forward scanning within months. The City Council Clerk archived city council minutes as well as current documents. These days, Human Resources and City Attorney offices are using Laserfiche, with more departments asking how they can be brought on board every year.

The Rotunda at the University of Virginia was designed by Thomas Jefferson

Progress has been gradual. “People have a hard time letting go of the tangible,” Collins says. “Then they see how much easier it is to get what you need with a few keystrokes. The person who was digging in the boxes of scanned documents the first year because they didn’t trust the digital system is now one of the most vocal advocates of this system.”

Managing index data quality and workflow took a little finessing as well. “Just as with misfiled paper documents, if an index key is entered incorrectly, the document may as well not exist since no one will find it,” she says. Collins automated indexing using Ascent Capture by Kofax and then Quick Fields (see sidebar) to improve accuracy and speed. “We centralized scanning and indexing to a few people with additional training,” she explains.

These days, Charlottesville’s new-found efficiency has taken many forms. “Time to find a document went from hours or sometimes days to seconds,” Collins beams. Using Laserfiche also inspired a paradigm shift in how the city considers what’s worth keeping around. “You start to see the value in that information, but also what isn’t valuable,” she says. “We eliminated the filing requirement for vehicles, which saved us not just money, but also from having to index and store over 20,000 documents a year. Today we stay current within a week in the personal property scanning area—in many cases, a document is stored with its metadata the same day it comes in!”

And there’s the cash savings. “We used to hire a full-time person for six months a year, just to open and file mail. We were usually just catching up for the year when the December bills went out. Now, we’ve saved half the cost of a FTE and only have one person scanning personal property files part-time just one day a week. We were able to eliminate another half of a position and reinvest the time into audit programs designed to increase City revenue,” she says. “That’s real dollars.”

Still, Collins realizes getting other municipalities to see the Laserfiche light means thinking of ROI in broader terms. “Getting funds is a challenge because the costs of doing things the old way aren’t staring people in the face. You’ll save a lot of time for your staff, but no one wants to eliminate staff or positions. Real estate isn’t a factor for a government that doesn’t pay rent or taxes. Nobody factors in the cost of lost documents or a disaster destroying all your files,” she says.

“You have to look at it as part of process improvements and think about what you could do with the time you save and the value of bringing data and paper together. Another wise user told me that to gain support for expanding the system to other documents, departments and processes, show them how it would work, because the truth is that it’s much simpler than people imagine it will be,” Collins adds. “We recently had a ‘what we like about our office’ meeting and so many people responded ‘Laserfiche!’ That’s why I recommend it. It’s easy to use, easy to learn, easy to configure, adapt or improve in particular—because of its incredible focus on the user.”

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.

“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.

Boulder City gets more than its share of requests for its public records. It’s a relatively new city—it turns 50 next year – and many of its original citizens still live there. That makes for a very active citizenry.

“Sometimes it’s a very hot political climate – voter turnout can be as high as 80%,” explains Malmstrom. “The community is so hands-on. We get so many requests for records. Some citizens would call everyday. We wanted something to simplify all their requests for records.”

When BC first implemented Laserfiche a decade ago, the town’s reasons for needing an electronic document management system were as simple as they were familiar. “By 1999, everything was in disarray,” remembers Records Clerk Teena Pickens. “Our filing cabinets were made of cardboard. It was a disaster.”

Malmstrom’s predecessor Vicki Mayes (now BC’s City Manager) looked to the neighboring city of Henderson, which had also been researching document management solutions. Mayes researched other systems, but in July 2001, chose Laserfiche based on two simple factors: “Because of the cost and it fit our needs,” relays Pickens. The age of the cardboard filing cabinet drew to a close and a new era began.

Boulder City implemented its new system, wisely, in phases.

City Clerk Pamella Malmstrom

“We started in-house, so it was easier for us,” Pickens remembers. “The permanent records were the first. We started with resolutions. As far as setting up folders, I thought about how it was going to be easiest for people other than myself to find what they were looking for. We set up a ‘Resolutions’ folder, then the different committees—‘Planning,’ ‘Redevelopment,’ etc. Then by years.”

“It was a lot of trial and error,” Malmstrom admits.

Buy-in from other departments was gradual but steady.

“We started in the City Clerk’s office and then moved on to other departments and got them comfortable with using the system. People in general can be resistant to change. It’s a learning process,” she admits. “The more department heads see the benefits, the more departments come on board,” she says proudly. “The whole city’s using WebLink now—the police, personnel—everybody.”

Says Malmstrom, “Once people get the hang of it, Laserfiche is easier to use than Windows. It just takes a while to adjust.”

Boulder City may be a small town, but it covers a large area, including the El Dorado Valley, home to the city’s “Energy Zone,” which is devoted to developing solar power– and where development is closely watched by the public. “People are very interested in anything that happens and they want to be able to research it,” says Pickens.

“The BC Landfill is another hot topic,” adds Malmstrom. “That’s an understatement,” Pickens laughs.

Records Manager Teena Pickens and Deputy City Clerk Lorene Krumm

“We had people who wanted to see land sales,” adds Deputy City Clerk Lorene Krumm. “We had enough calls from citizens where it made sense to make them available.” BC had been using WebLink internally since 2001, but by 2006, the addition of a security firewall allowed access to the public. But with public access came the need to file Boulder City’s land sales to make them, well, more accessible. Explains Krumm, “We came up with a system where the agreements were apart from resolutions and ordinances.”

Citizen buy-in has been near-unanimous. “The concerns and complaints have been few,” Krumm says. “If you know what you’re looking for you can find it in the folder structure.”

But, she says, that’s only because a lot of care went into setting up those folders.

“You have to think about how you want to set-up folder structures. If you don’t make it easy, you’re going to get more calls,” warns Krumm.

One thing’s for sure, fulfilling requests is easier. “When we have a request for a contract in the energy zone, you can be on the phone attaching it to an e-mail and sending it—as opposed to getting up walking down the hall, finding the file, going through 150 pages, locating the pages, copying them and then sending them out.”

The most recent addition to the Boulder City Laserfiche family, has also been the most resource-saving: Agenda Manager.

“I’d been asking for Agenda Manager for years,” Malmstrom sighs. When a 2005 primary election budget wound up unspent, Malmstrom requested the funds go to purchasing Agenda Manager.

The results in her office were instantaneous. “Instead of printing out 23 500-page packets, people just look up agenda packets online,” she says. “It just condenses paper and time.”

The rest of the city has followed suit, slowly but surely. “It takes a while to adjust to change, but once you get used to [using Agenda Manager], it makes everything much easier, especially if there are a lot of last-minute changes,” offers Pickens. “I can’t even imagine what we’d do without it.”

Next up for Boulder City is the introduction of Quick Fields as part of its latest acquisition—Laserfiche Records Management Edition, due early next year.

“We’re continuing to evolve,” says Malmstrom.

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is one of the things makes Boulder City truly unique among the state’s neon-cityscapes: “We’re the only city in Nevada that doesn’t have gambling,” she explains.

But doesn’t mean Boulder City doesn’t know how to have a good time.

“We’re actually small enough that we can still shut down the streets for community events,” offers Malmstrom. It sounds so idyllic, you imagine someone could be passing out milk and cookies at these community events. “More like beer and margaritas,” she laughs.

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.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Watch Rachelle Meredith describe her Laserfiche success in her own words.

When the Town consolidated three administration buildings into one, the Safety Codes department, which encompasses building inspection services, began investigating scanning solutions. When the Town’s records manager was taking a course at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary, the instructor commented that Laserfiche provided “top-notch products and services for public and private corporations,” says Rachelle Meredith, corporate records administrator.

After researching Laserfiche, the records manager then invited a representative from Laserfiche reseller IKON Office Solutions to conduct a demonstration. After issuing an RFP, the Town selected Laserfiche, primarily for its records management functionality, OCR capabilities and the Agenda Manager and WebLink modules.

“We love Records Management Edition’s versatility. Its ease of use was very important to us, both to gain staff buy-in and work effortlessly in our busy environment,” Meredith says.

Initially the Safety Codes assistant and manager began scanning all new building and development permit applications into Laserfiche. These applications often contain more than 300 pages, ranging from architectural drawings for housing and commercial buildings and all their associated electrical and plumbing permits to individual applications for decks and other home additions.

As Okotoks entered into its prime building season and the number of permits submitted began to climb, the effectiveness of implementing Laserfiche became quickly apparent. “The immediate benefits were obvious,” remarks Meredith. “When we saw how we saved time locating current information, we began to realize how Laserfiche would benefit our external customers as the project continued. It was a great motivation to keep going.”

At this point, Safety Codes has added more than 3,000 records to their system, saving money on paper supplies and reducing impact on the environment. “Staff really noticed the difference,” Meredith comments. “Time savings was one advantage, because finding information was so much easier. Documents were immediately accessible to safety code officers when they were out in the field, and they had access to accurate, up-to-date information that helped them make better decisions.”

And now the benefits of Laserfiche have extended to builders, professional contractors and homeowners applying for permits. “Safety Codes staff can now e-mail approved documentation back to the applicant, as well as receive initial applications by e-mail, which can be dropped straight into the records management system,” Meredith says. “This saves builders time and money, because they don’t have to come to the office to drop off or collect documentation. Instead, they receive an immediate response.”

External clients aren’t the only ones noticing the difference—other departments are recognizing the benefits of Laserfiche too. In fact, Safety Codes staff, including manager Rob Mueller, assistant Diane Scott and support staff member Ann Williams, were recently nominated for a prestigious annual corporate award, based on the effects other departments have realized from the Laserfiche system. “This is a coveted award, because peers from all 22 business units nominate and select the highest performing team,” explains Meredith. “Safety Codes was recognized for their creative approach, which was encouraging.”

In fact, the Assessment Services department has identified several key tasks that have become much more efficient since Safety Codes implemented Laserfiche. “Off-site trips to locate records have been reduced significantly because staff can instantly review documentation to identify if there’s been a history relating to a certain parcel of land. Also, copier wear-and-tear has been eliminated because they no longer have to piece together copies to recreate 24”x36” drawings,” Meredith says.

“Moreover, staff has easy access to permits correspondence and information, making it easier for assessors to identify any deficiencies or problems in blueprints and written inspection details,” she adds. “More importantly, staff can use Laserfiche’s zoom tools to enlarge numbers on blueprints, so they can read details electronically. It makes their lives so much easier.”

Based on the success in the Safety Codes department, Okotoks expanded Laserfiche to their Cemeteries/Open Spaces department. “Cemeteries is a legislated service that requires us to manage cemetery records ‘in perpetuity,’ which essentially means forever,” Meredith says. “So it was critical that this project was done correctly, right from the very start.”

The Cemeteries project was focused primarily on creating archival records, because, by their nature, cemetery records are historically important. Since Okotoks became a recognized municipality in 1904, cemetery recordkeeping has changed significantly, from a receipt of monies collected for the burial plot and an index card with the deceased’s name, to a file containing anywhere from 8-14 internal and external documents.

“From the minute we started this project we knew how convenient it would be to access information from our desktop computers,” explains Meredith. “Having current and correct information to provide to grieving relatives immediately is crucial.”

Cemetery Administrator Monica Caines began the project on a day-forward basis, scanning records as they were received and archiving records as they were pulled. After nearly two years, almost 4,700 records are now searchable through a customized template. In fact, the Cemeteries project proved so useful, Town staff next began scanning and indexing Open Spaces (parks) records. With a customized template to aid in indexing, users can instantly access documents regarding the Town’s parks, boulevards, landscaping and horticulture.

In early 2009, Okotoks residents and other Web users will be able to use WebLink to search current bylaws and more than 100 years’ worth of historical bylaws. The Town also plans to implement Workflow in the Safety Codes department, and eventually expand Workflow into finance and other departments to optimize their business processes.

In recognition of the Town’s success with Laserfiche, Okotoks is currently in the running for this year’s Run Smarter Awards. “Laserfiche is fairly new to western Canadian municipalities,” Meredith says. “We’ve had a lot of attention from other Town departments, and also from other municipalities. They want to know more about how Laserfiche is helping us meet our sustainability and environmental guidelines, as well as how we’re using Laserfiche to work smarter, not longer.”

Despite recognition from inside and outside town limits, Okotoks continues to use Laserfiche for the primary reason it was purchased: to support a sustainable future for the town’s residents. “We really believed that Laserfiche was the best overall solution for our long-term needs,” Meredith says.

“We’re a rapidly growing community that has a solid reputation for being progressive and supporting an entrepreneurial, leading-edge culture,” she adds. “Laserfiche helps us as we strive to live and work in an environmentally responsible manner.”

The soon-to-be-completed Burj Dubai will be the world's tallest building.

The City of Dubai already had an expansive—and expensive—document management system in place when the scanning project began. Given such an investment, why, then, would they purchase a brand-new Laserfiche system for the project? The answer is simple: Simplicity.

“The City of Dubai’s existing document management system is complex and not very user-friendly or easy to implement,” explains Mustafa Siddiqui, business solutions specialist for Pixel Digital Systems (PDS), the City of Dubai’s Laserfiche reseller. “We needed software that we could implement quickly, and that users could understand right away. We found all that in Laserfiche.”

Siddiqui credits BMB Sal, official Laserfiche supplier to the Middle East, for making the implementation so smooth. “We’ve had a great experience with BMB,” he says. “They responded immediately to our questions during the implementation.”

Installing Laserfiche proved fairly simple. Next came the real challenge: Creating a logical file structure for a diverse array of document types. Siddiqui and company are glad to have Laserfiche’s flexible templates to help them efficiently capture and index documents from multiple city departments. “We have to process documents for all the city’s departments—finance, human resources, building and accounting,” he says, “so the ability to quickly create and modify templates for all these document types is a major advantage.”

It’s not just multiple document types involved in the project. As Dubai becomes ever more multicultural, the need to accommodate documents in multiple languages increases. With 85 percent of documents in Arabic and the remaining 15 percent in English, the Laserfiche system’s strong multi-language support was essential to Dubai’s purchasing decision.

The City of Dubai’s central archive center follows International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Six Sigma quality control standards for archiving and storing documents. To preserve these standards, PDS have engineered a sophisticated quality control process using Laserfiche Workflow. Before they enter the Laserfiche repository, newly-scanned documents are routed to PDS staff for an initial quality check. The second step in the workflow involves template assignment and indexing. Finally, both PDS and municipal staff review processed documents before permanently archiving them. Thanks to Workflow, each step in this process is fully automated, saving time and resources throughout each stage of quality control.

Given Dubai’s surging population and related construction boom, the city deemed it critical to implement a scalable system to manage the sharp increase in incoming paperwork. “It’s definitely the right time for organizations in the Middle East to adopt an electronic document management system,” Siddiqui explains. “Organizations in this region face large amounts of paper coupled with reduced manpower and huge rental expenses.”

It’s somewhat serendipitous, then, that Laserfiche is so well-equipped to handle such growth. Recently, the City of Dubai expanded the current back-file conversion project to include another million pages, and PDS is bidding to for the opportunity to integrate Laserfiche with Dubai’s existing system to handle all day-forward scanning.

Members of the back-file conversion team at the project's kickoff meeting. From L to R: Amine Hakim Karrouche, Fareed Ahmed AbdulSattar, Stephen Macintosh, Tariq Ahmed Zarooni, Hussain Abdulla Fardan, Yousif Shams, Huda Ozair Mubarak, Khalil Hussain, Gurmeet Singh, Ibrahim Miligi, Mustafa Siddiqui, Manoj Ganapathy, Khurram Jamil.

“We plan to integrate Laserfiche with the city’s existing system, which will be used for storage,” Siddiqui says. But for everyday work, users will use the Laserfiche interface exclusively, because it’s so user-friendly.” In addition to greatly simplifying business process, the integration will strengthen the city’s IT infrastructure. “Laserfiche will help the City of Dubai increase the value of its existing investment by making it so much easier to use,” he adds.

While the plans for citywide expansion of the Laserfiche system are not yet finalized, if recent results are any indication, expect Laserfiche to become a key part of Dubai’s infrastructure. “We’re very happy to have been awarded a contract extension for the back-file conversion project,” Siddiqui says. “We look forward to continued success with Dubai, and hopefully, to new partnerships with other municipalities in the region.”