Turn on the Power with Agile ECM

Robert Frost‘s heart-stirring poem, The Road Less Traveled, expresses the idea that the sometimes seemingly small choices we make in life can truly impact our experience of it. And his tome, in particular, helps us to see that following the path of the “crowds” is not necessarily the best direction to follow. This may be true in life, and definitely is in many instances, but it is a real gamble when you are talking about implementing a department- or enterprise-wide systems change. The risks of failed implementation, or that the system does not live up to its billing, are very real, and they can be very painful.

The City of Norfolk, VA, Department of Human Services faced this decision point with its document management system some years ago. The Human Services Department is tasked with meeting the needs of the city’s thousands of residents with various assistance programs, such as Medicaid, Child Protective Services, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Workforce Development. As one of the top 2 highest “in-demand” Human Services departments in the Commonwealth of Virginia, they have no shortage of paper and they have stringent program and procedural requirements. Recognizing the need to move to a paperless environment some years ago, they adopted a document management system, EZ Filer, which had been adopted by several other Human Services departments in the Commonwealth. Even though many other Norfolk City departments had very successful implementations of Laserfiche Enterprise Content Management, and the fact that EZ Filer was relatively unknown and unproven, the city selected EZ Filer. Over time, the limitations of the EZ Filer system became apparent to the Norfolk department, and workarounds were created to compensate for some of the key limitations of the system such as: limited storage space, limited search capability, very slow response times and no records management rules. The final decision to move to a more robust enterprise content management system came when the company who developed the EZ Filer document management system filed for bankruptcy. According to Bonnie Spence, Programmer Analyst for the city, “we are no longer able to upgrade or modify the system.”

Norfolk DHS chose UnityECM to partner with to solve their daunting problem. Besides the EZ filer trainwreck, Norfolk identified 9 other key reasons to commission UnityECM to completely overhaul their records management and document management processes and workflows, including: automated scanning and indexing into their system and a records management system that was compliant with the Library of Virginia, and which runs completely in the background with no end-user training curve or intervention. (Get all Top 10 Reasons here)

According to Mark J. Formella, IT Application Development Supervisor for Norfolk, “Successful implementations do not happen by accident or luck. Planning, communication, training, dedication and hard work are all keys to making LaserFiche work for DHS. Everyone who is involved with this project deserves a huge thank you…Change is never easy, but all of our staff who were accustomed to EZ-Filer, made the leap to make LaserFiche work. In the weeks and months to come, we will take advantage of additional LaserFiche tools and implement improvements which will make many tasks easier and faster to accomplish. We will also be bringing other units onboard, so they can too can manage their documentation electronically.”

So thus goes the story. Sometimes, even Robert Frost I’m sure would agree, that the best road is the one that is well-worn for a reason. For more information, contact UnityECM.com today at 888-400-9064.

The other day while visiting a customer I thought I was going to have to quickly find a Kleenex or a fire extinguisher. She was at the point of an emotional rage-enduced breakdown.  What was the cause?  Microfiche.  Tight resources has everyone in this public office doing double duty anyway, but the constituents are always first.  So in the middle of tackling the normal daily challenges she gets a call, “I need a copy of a resolution that I think was made in 1979.”  “Yes, ma’am, can you narrow down the date to a month?”  “Oh honey, I don’t even know if I got the right year!”  So what does this mean for our duty bound hanky-in-hand warrior?

Slaying the Dinosaur!

Descending the steps to it’s chamber our warrior steals her resolve, “I will not fail…this time!”  Turning the corner she spies her nemesis sitting nonchalantly next to a file cabinet that bears its “children.” Offspring of another era, wrapped in tight little rolls with dates ranging from yesterday to the early 1900′s.  Somewhere in there the information lies, the challenge is coaxing it out from among thousands of images on a machine that has no readily accessible spare parts and for which most repair stores only sigh at when requested to give aide.  Three hours later the “resolution” is found and our gallant warrior, exhilarated, calls her constituent to claim the prize – only to discover that the constituent’s grandson already found it on the web.  Fire extinguisher!

There has got to be an easier way!  Convert those images into an electronic image that can be saved and indexed onto a shared drive, or better yet, placed into a Enterprise Content Management System (ECM), that makes finding these resources not only easily accessible on your computer but in most cases can be emailed to the constituent before they hang up the phone.  Then have an office party and move the slain dragon outside and send it to retirement with its long lost friend the mimeograph machine!

Everyone needs Microsoft Sharepoint, right? It’s all the rage…but just WHAT do you actually do with it? This is the critical first decision you must make to enjoy a successful Sharepoint implementation. Most people have a basic understanding of what it is “supposed” to do, i.e. collaboration, business intelligence, document management, workflow, etc. But where do you start? How can you quickly deploy a solution and realize the value that Sharepoint can bring to your organization? What we typically see is this: an organization has heard the buzz, wants to join the party, and has purchased MOSS with the high hopes of it immediately solving their content management struggles. Then reality strikes. Various Sharepoint sites are thrown up for different business units, document libraries are created where users can store their digital assets, duplication occurs, information sharing is compromised, workflows are created that optimized certain processes, but fail to satisfy most scenarios. Using Sharepoint actually starts to hinder productivity and users begin to wonder why it was implemented to begin with.

A successful implementation begins with the correct mindset of what Sharepoint really is. It is not a solution in itself. I like to think of Sharepoint as a platform on which you can build and integrate solutions to most of your business problems that aren’t already addressed by your Line of Business application (EPR, MRP, Finance, etc). Sharepoint has its obvious strengths, but also has some not-so-obvious weaknesses. For instance, it can greatly enhance a knowledge worker’s productivity by providing a dashboard to manage and execute most of the tasks or projects that they work on throughout the day. It provides an enterprise search tool that allows the worker to easily find the information they need to do their job, no matter where that information is stored. It can also be used to centralize all of the unstructured databases that an organization typically has: spreadsheets, access files, and word document lists. However, there are areas where Sharepoint doesn’t measure up that could cause a deployment to suffer. Document/Records management is one of these areas. Yes, Sharepoint is a fine storage location for the Microsoft Office documents that you create, but what about all the paper records that need to be stored and archived electronically? How do you plan to get them into Sharepoint? When you have scanned a majority of those unstructured documents into Sharepoint your overall system performance can suffer due to the terabyte of files stored and binary objects in the database itself. Then, what is your recourse?

Prior to Sharepoint going mainstream, the document management industry was already mature, with many great products available that do all these things and do them WELL. Sharepoint has all but ignored these major obstacles and still billed itself as a document management system. Don’t get me wrong, the more I know about Sharepoint, the more I love it. It has opened up new doors to organizational efficiency by providing a common space for people to USE the content once its been created. The main point I have today is that when it comes to document management, you don’t have to make the choice between Sharepoint and a traditional ECM system such as Laserfiche (see Agile ECM). The best solutions integrate both, using each system’s strengths along with their shared technologies to create a completely holistic, end-to-end solution. And the add-on benefit is that these integrated solutions drastically reduce deployment time because you no longer have to customize Sharepoint with code to overcome its shortcomings.

Be sure to check back next month, where I will discuss a few concrete examples of where the marriage of Sharepoint and Laserfiche clearly is a synergistic combination with virtually limitless potential.

The Center for Digital Government and Digital Communities Magazine named the City of Norfolk, VA, the “Top Digital City in America” in 2009. The survey, which has been run for 9 years now, examines how municipalities incorporate information technology into operations which better serve citizens. Norfolk has been a long-time client of Unity Business Systems, and was one of the first adopters of the Laserfiche Document Management System in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

“This year’s winners demonstrate how cities have faced economic challenges with creativity and innovation in the use of information technology,” said Cathilea Robinett, executive director for the Center for Digital Government.

Other Unity Business Systems local government clients that placed in the Top Ten (based upon their respective sizes) are: the City of Virginia Beach (6th with population over 250,000), the City of Alexandria (4th with population between 125k and 249k), the City of Hampton (8th with population between 125k and 249k).

For the complete article, please visit the Center for Digital Government or Unity Business Systems.

In December, 2008, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, launched Renew Virginia, a year-long series of legislative and administrative actions promoting renewable energy, creating green jobs, and encouraging preservation of the environment. A noble goal, indeed, and as many such initiatives are, typically more challenging to realize than decree. Environment preservation is on everyone’s mind today, and rightfully so. As we consider that the world is now home to over 6 Billion people, we must all be mindful of shared resources.

One of the key environmental areas that governmental agencies, in particular, can focus on is the reduction of paper in their processes. Over the past 10 years, many of these organizations have embraced the idea of moving away from paper, and have implemented document management systems, which allow paper to be stored in electronic format for ease of retrieval and sharing without the creation of additional paper. Many have even taken the additional step of ‘digitizing‘ or converting their older, historical paper and microfilm records to digital formats, and have been able to ‘recycle’ the vastly expensive space they were previously using to store these documents.

One of the most overlooked areas of significant improvement, however, is the point at which citizens actually interact or interface with these agencies. Currently, many of the Commonwealth’s municipalities have gaggles of necessary forms posted on their respective websites for citizens to find, print and complete on their own with no employee interaction. This is a step in the right direction, but somewhat limited in it’s efficiency and ‘green’ power. For instance, if I want to have a garage sale in my hometown of Chesapeake, I can go to the city website, pull up the permit form, fill in the required fields (all good so far…) but THEN, I have to print the form (waste of paper and ink), write a check (waste of expensive paper and ink), and either drive to the Commissioner of Revenue’s office (waste of gas and time) or mail it the the COR’s office (waste of envelope, stamp and post office gas and time). Once the Commissioner’s office receives my permit request and check, the paper form (which started out as an electronic document) now has to be digitized and entered into their document management system for approval and archiving. The check also has to be deposited (and someone must verify that it clears…) The inefficiencies are monumental!

Doesn’t it make much more sense to eliminate the waste that occurs between the original electronic form on the website and the completed electronic form and deposit in the Commissioner’s system? A cursory review of the City of Chesapeake‘s online forms page shows over 140 forms! How much paper, gasoline and manpower could be saved by eliminating the ‘waste’ in this process? Multiplied by the number of municipalities across the Commonwealth?

So, congratulations to many of the Virginia Governmental agencies that have adopted electronic content management systems…you are halfway there. You’ve ‘greened’ the back-end of your process. Let’s begin to focus on the front-end going forward, and a “Renewed Virginia” reality can be much closer for all of us. For more information on this idea, visit our website at http://www.unitysystems.biz