Hyland Software's Document Management Blog

Open Government – The Agenda and Document Management Connection

// May 22nd, 2013 // No Comments » // Government // Terri Jones

The topics of open government and transparency have dominated conversation at recent city and county meetings. Like most buzzwords, elected officials and policy thinkers talk about it, but county and city staffs have to figure out how to do it – all while performing the usual tasks of everyday government.

One lucky break for these topics is that there is technology that can meet the open government and transparency policy directions and make government more efficient. And it does this while laying the groundwork for self-service options that will dominate government in the future of smartphones, websites and tablets (or whatever is next).

So, what is this key technology that cities and counties need to support their open government and transparency needs? Document management.

Document management is at the core of managing your agenda and minutes creation, distribution and meeting portal goals – and it uses three key components to accomplish this:

1. It has a document repository.

The legislative process is dominated by documents, agenda items, contracts, reports and other supporting materials that form the core of your agenda packets. Later, these same documents are the history of your decisions and they should be easy for you and your constituents to retrieve and consult. They should also be safe from natural disasters, fire and other destructive forces. Using document management means that you have safe, permanent, electronic storage of all of these documents.

2. It has workflow.

Of course, you have workflow too. But you need to automate your processes and set timers on them as well. Using document management and workflow, you can ensure that all reviewers see an item before it gets included on an agenda – which is important if you need legal or fiscal review. You can also time the review of an item so that reviewers are reminded that it needs to be looked at or that the item must be reviewed immediately or you will miss your posting deadline.

Workflow can also automate the creation of agenda packets and minutes and can publish those to council, to staff and even to your website with just one click. The packets can use your current template, be paginated, include or exclude confidential documents and even begin to build themselves during your meeting as you note motions and decisions. The key to improving your efficiency is the automation of document management workflow.

3. It can power your citizen portal.

Several cities and counties have re-built their websites to provide a convenient, 24/7 destination for constituents that want to be informed about their community’s decisions and policy-making. Since so many ideas and decisions in your community get their start in documents, it makes sense to connect the portal to a document repository. That would allow the process and the publication to happen automatically with video and audio linked to the agenda, the minutes and the supporting documents that your legislative body used to make their decision. A portal is a powerful tool to serve up each of these and to do it in the form of a 24/7 website will become increasingly important as the constituents who grew up on smartphones settle in your community.

As you consider the intersection of great technologies like document management with your legislative process, consider that in the technology world, document management and workflow are foundational, like your legislative body. Together they can be a powerful force for citizen engagement and transparency. And the greatest part? Together, they make your government better.

More and more, business leaders turning to mobile to stay connected; make decisions

// April 8th, 2013 // No Comments » // Cloud Computing, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, Government, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, IT, Mobile // Gabriel Baird

Put mobile in the pocket of your decision makers

What do business leaders and their teenage children have in common? In most cases, it’s not the belief that the greatest singer of all time is Justin Bieber.Both young people and decision makers, however, are together in leading the Internet migration from the desktop to mobile devices.The Washington Post reported recently that a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found about 25  percent of the nation’s youth connect to the Internet primarily using mobile devices.The study doesn’t provide data on adults. However, social contact manager Gist, which Research in Motion acquired in 2011, has an excellent infographic about “The Mobile Workstyle.” The graphic shows that 87 percent of IT managers have handed out mobile devices and that mobile access climbed 36 percent between 2009 and 2010.The number of workers going mobile continues to climb. That’s obvious in any airport where business travelers are glued to their handheld devices, answering emails and making business decisions from the concourse.

Critical business information needs to get into the hands of the right people at the right time. In today’s global marketplace, the right people are often on the road. This often creates bottlenecks in workflows until those road warriors can take action. Your ECM vendor provides access to documents from anywhere allowing decision makers to – for instance – review, approve or deny requests.

At Hyland, we’ve seen the trend accelerate since leading the ECM industry into the mobile frontier. Hundreds of our customers are using mobile modules for OnBase to access and act on key documents using their Android phones, Blackberries, Windows phones, iPads and iPhones.

“We’re constantly extending OnBase features so our customers can evolve their solutions in lockstep with the latest devices and get even more and better results,” said Bill Filion, vice president of development for Hyland Software.

The Pew report has prompted talking heads on TV to raise concerns about teens connecting to the Internet without adult supervision. Certainly, music snobs are just as concerned about adults using the Internet to watch performances by Bieber.

Better government IT starts with smart procurement

// March 29th, 2013 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Government, IT // Terri Jones

There are many challenges to using the competitive procurement process to purchase IT solutions for government.

The dilemma is more than just large and cumbersome RFP package production, long software demos and lengthy review and contracting. Government has reduced funding for investments and can no longer afford to get it wrong – especially for core systems like document management, GIS, accounting and finance solutions and other large, critical systems. That means the best approach is to improve the way you procure IT.

Traditional procurement rules and processes aren’t designed for the complexity of IT. Procurement focuses on getting the best price and terms for commodity items that are easily definable and available from multiple vendors. IT purchases don’t often fit this approach because technology is usually deployed as a “solution” — a set of products, consulting and support services and processes that are often developed after vendors are selected. And, often proposals come in with different pricing schemes and different descriptions that make it difficult to do an “apples to apples” comparison.

Similarly, standard purchasing terms and conditions were usually not created for IT. The nature of IT investments might require adjustments to payment terms, delivery parameters, considerations of warranty coverage and other standards that are defined for general purchasing. You may need to develop new terms and practices for the “best-value” contracting that is often a better choice for IT projects.

For all of these reasons, I think procurement staff, like most of us, struggle to keep up with technology. An IT investment typically includes many variable elements such as multiple licenses, product bundles or versions, and multiyear support contracts or service subscriptions. These elements can be confusing and is only compounded by rapid technology change and the increasing number of highly diverse IT projects.

Additionally, the increasing adoption of IT services and cloud solutions instead of hardware or software product purchases requires a new understanding of service pricing and delivery models.

So, how can your procurement get smarter about IT?

• Use vendor white papers or invite vendors to educate staff about a technology before the RFP is developed. This gives you a way to be more precise in describing what you need for your organization from the solution under consideration.
• Visit neighboring jurisdictions that have implemented a solution or use an online meeting to see actual solutions that address your needs so you can understand realistic outcomes before you write requirements. Use your peers’ experience to write your RFP and to understand how to evaluate a type of solution.
• Shared services and interlocal agreements can also be used to to leverage another jurisdiction’s procurement. TUsing contracts such as GSA or state term schedules in order to avoid creating your own contract is another option. This can save money and allow you to benefit from IT pioneers at the county or city level.
• Check resources like the National Association of Counties, the National League of Cities, the National Association of State CIOs and the Center for Digital Government to learn more about specific solutions and who is using them.
• Finding new ways to research and procure technology solutions begins with knowing what you don’t want every bit as much as what you do want. To identify this knowledge within your organization, ask the question that is at the core of what you are trying to achieve: What will success look like for your organization and why is it important? This question about project success prompts discussion with the business side and with users about what they need and what they can realistically expect from a technology purchase. In turn, this discussion helps to create more realistic RFPs, more targeted vendor responses, and a more efficient purchasing effort.

Changing procurement does not mean throwing out competitive bidding, but it does mean evaluating our practices to ensure that your process picks the solution with the best chance of meeting the project needs at a fair price.

Document management and accounts payable: 3 reasons to go there

// March 28th, 2013 // No Comments » // Accounts Payable, Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Government, State and Local Government // Terri Jones

Turn paper piles into electronic files

As government begins to turn the corner on budget woes, local government has a golden opportunity to transform their processes and position themselves for quick return on investment – and a conscious movement towards the government that our future constituents will want and expect. It is, at times, overwhelming to look at the potential IT solutions you could implement. But it helps to look at the core processes of government and target your attention, your technology to make these processes more efficient.How do I define efficient? Pretty simply, I see it as taking staff less time to complete processes. Even more importantly, looking see it as ways to reclaim staff time by using technology to eliminate tasks that were previously necessary because government had to rely on paper to get things done.

Document management is a key piece of technology for government. But I often get asked, “Where should we start?” and “where does it make sense to expand document or ECM solutions?” My answer - accounts payable.

Why start in accounts payable?

My first answer is the massive volume of paper processed by accounting departments. But it really comes down to how the paper slows the process of paying all those bills. And it only gets worse if you have been forced to cut some of the staff that works in your accounting department.

My next answer is the speed of retrieval. Your accounting staff needs to find critical information, answer phone calls from vendors or colleagues, figure out whether a bill should be paid and determine whether the goods or services have been received. With the hundreds of thousands of transactions that agencies do every year, finding these answers by going to the file cabinet or going through an inbox or inter-office mail envelopes is not sustainable when your budget and your staff have been cut.

These are reactionary reasons. How about something that will position you for the future?

The best reason to use ECM for AP is transparency and self-service. By digitizing the documents, you not only solve the two dilemmas above, you create internal and external transparency. Internally, the process is entirely transparent. Staff can find invoices and documents they submitted as well as where they are in the process of approval or payment. Managers and submitters can receive emails that tell them when they need to review and approve purchase orders or invoices and they can approve them right from Outlook.

Internal transparency certainly helps, but what if you also met growing constituent demand for transparency using the same solution that help with the challenges above? By digitizing documents, you can make them available online so constituents can see how money is being spent without having to travel to your office or make a public record request. This saves their time and your clerks time too. Some agencies are even using their digital documents and workflows to create vendor portals so vendors can view the status of their invoices without making a call to your staff – using self-service to keep them working on processing instead of answering the phone.

Using document management in your accounting department creates that rare moment when the same investment can solve today’s challenges while also answering a future need.

The HR Compliance Dilemma for Government: 4 Ways Document Management Can Help

// March 20th, 2013 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Government, State and Local Government // Terri Jones

Government human resources (HR) departments may not be facing the difficulties of finding and hiring huge numbers of staff, but they do face other HR challenges that can have severe effects on funding and legal obligations. From public safety to schools to running federally-funded programs, government staff needs to be credentialed, trained, certified and kept aware of key programmatic rules. The challenge is how to keep track of all of these compliance requirements when staff is reduced and rules change or get more complicated.

One way to manage this across a county, city or state is to use document management. The following four features of document management help government HR departments meet these compliance challenges:

• Central secure repository to store all required documents – Knowing where the documents that prove compliance are and being able to find them quickly is critical to managing compliance with less staff. By storing documents digitally, they are not lost, they are secure and you can find what you need in seconds.
• Automating certification and credentialing processes - If part of your department’s HR work is keeping staff properly certified (including specialized training), workflow capabilities in document management can help. Workflow can time requirements, prompt you for required documentation and email you the next time you need to complete re-certification tasks or courses.  It can also email HR staff to let them know who needs to complete tasks or who is out of compliance. Using workflow transforms HR from constant monitoring to focusing on people that are out of compliance so those situations can be addressed immediately. And, with workflow always running in the background, you can stop worrying about missing a key requirement or deadline due to staff reductions or increased compliance responsibility.
• Automating the distribution of policies and procedures – Few government programs or HR policies stay the same. How do you currently distribute policy changes and track acknowledgement? Are you able to test your staff’s understanding of changes? Can you easily report who hasn’t completed or acknowledged policies when that is required? In many cases, making staff aware of changes is a legal or programmatic requirement. But with less staff, it becomes difficult to accomplish this in a paper-based world. Most of us receive new policies by email, which is fast. But how do you track whether someone actually read the attachment? With document management, you can email people that they have a new policy to review and verify that they review each page. You can also ask them to electronically acknowledge the policy and even administer a test. HR staff can track staff progress and run reports to allow supervisors to view their staff’s progress. With document management, you can stop routing slips and inter-office mail distribution, eliminate printing and photocopying –  freeing up time while improving your policy management.
• Audit trails and tools to find missing documentation- One of the strongest features of HR document management solutions is its ability to create an audit trail and to report or require documents. On the first day of your government job you probably brought some identification, signed some paperwork and an HR employee might have used a paper checklist to be sure that you submitted all required documents. Document management automatically checks the entire repository and tells you across all staff if a document is missing. It can also help  HR employees collect documents and perform necessary tasks using workflow to ensure that everything has been done. How would you handle a requirement to collect a new document from all employees? Perhaps your newer hires submitted the document but now you need to find out which members have not submitted it yet? Using document management, you can run a report in seconds to find every member of your staff that hasn’t submitted the document. By using document management and eliminating paper, your ability to look at your document requirements at every level is enhanced.

Most jobs in government have compliance components. Some, like teachers, public safety officers, or health care workers have massive requirements from training to background checks to reoccurring certifications and training. These requirements, particularly in an era of smaller government, require new tools to meet requirements and assist smaller HR teams to ensure compliance. Document management is the perfect answer to the HR compliance requirements and the staffing levels of government today.

Top 3 New Year’s Resolutions for Government Agencies

// January 7th, 2013 // No Comments » // Government, IT, Mobile, State and Local Government, Workflow // Terri Jones

For the time being, we have averted the fiscal cliff. However, as local governments return from the holidays, they continue to face the same struggles with budget, smaller staffs and continued expectations from their constituents. As cities and counties face the new year, how can they simplify their approach to IT and feel good about selecting the right trends to follow?

Here are three resolutions that will launch local government onto a path for better constituent service and more efficient government:

1. Go digital: By eliminating paper and moving to electronic forms, document management and workflow automation, you save time associated with filing, printing and copying information – a very good thing if you have had to reduce staff. Paperless processes eliminate lost documents and speed up processes, making constituents happy as well as supporting green initiatives.

Automating paper processes also makes it easier for government to collaborate between departments that may be serving the same constituents, whether it’s a case management approach to permitting inquiries, human services or economic development. Eliminating duplication of efforts and tasks that are simply the burden of paper will immediately increase government efficiency. Now is the time to capture some of those savings!

2. Go mobile: If going digital is transforming the core of traditional government, going mobile is the recognition that having the right IT hardware to do our jobs in government is no longer a luxury. Children are using smartphones and will grow up thinking of them as necessities. As a result, it’s essential for government to harness this extreme mobility. Doing so allows staff to do more work in the field. With the prices of handsets and tablets so low, it’s also cheaper than buying a desktop, not to mention the fact that field staff are seldom in the office to work on that desktop.

The additional time available to field staff by avoiding the drive to the office, collecting and re-filing paper documents and the ability to know about an emergency situation instantly will change the backlog of work and the perception of your service. As you move to a paperless world, going mobile gets easier. As a result, it makes sense to couple your paper elimination with departments who need access to documents in the field so you can increase the impact of these two resolutions by making them work together.

3. Go self-service: Some time ago, I wrote that I believed one of the things we dislike about government is waiting – waiting in line, waiting on the phone, waiting for things to happen. Coupled with the availability of so many self-service options through services like online shopping and banking, pressure has been put on local government to offer the same experience. Self-service opportunities are no longer “nice to have.” The availability of the Internet, the smartphone  and the “always connected citizen” have simply changed the game.

Today, constituents expect everyone to have a website with services – not just static text. The good news for strapped government is that this trend has positive benefits in so many areas that it must be prioritized as you look at your IT investment for the coming year. If your most popular paper-based forms were available online, people could conduct their business at their convenience.

And, if they could see how this process is moving forward by visiting a portal, receiving a text message or an email, they would enjoy this convenience rather than waiting for one of your overworked staff members to answer the phone during business hours. Imagine if this could happen automatically so you didn’t have to worry about an application languishing in a backlog or even getting lost in the mountain of paper on a desk.

The advantage of a self-service government process is that it moves faster, keeps constituents informed AND relieves your staff of tasks AT THE SAME TIME. And it all starts with going paperless and being aware of the tremendous opportunity offered by affordable mobile technologies that are now in the hands of many of our constituents.

Technology is always touting the next big thing, and it can be difficult to select or to risk scarce dollars on a trend you aren’t sure about. However, these trends are proven to save money and time while embracing something that our constituents expect. Going paperless, mobile and self-service are the essence of faster, cheaper, better government and will serve your community well if you resolve to make this your IT road map for the new year.

Thoughts on the Government IT Roadmap – Three Roads to Consider

// November 27th, 2012 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Government, IT, Mobile, Software as a Service, Workflow // Terri Jones

In government, we struggle to develop a consistent, multi-year roadmap. Sometimes, we’re too busy, but often, it’s because our mission and initiatives change with every election cycle. One of the things I love about enterprise content management (ECM) solutions is that no matter who’s in office, they support the heart of government – the documents that record and drive our processes.

To be successful, it’s important to analyze your political environment and select a path for your ECM solution that is appropriate and sustainable through multiple elections. Despite political changes, an ECM solution will always improve government. However, since documents are a key component of every department and process, how do you select what to do next? If you are not sure where to start, consider the following ideas to begin the quest for faster, cheaper and better government:

1. Be strategic. Always think of how you can leverage your ECM solution to:

• Increase transparency – Provide constituents and vendors with visibility into transactions to offer insight to decisions. Give staff visibility into processes to see the progress of the work they do.
• Create more self-service options – Reduce pressure on staff to complete these tasks and meet the growing expectation of a connected constituency.
• Share services with other government entities – Share technology licensing, hosting and expertise to save money and provide a way to procure critical solutions, even with a reduced budget.
• Use mobile devices – Not only do constituents expect mobile apps, staff also benefit because mobile devices reduce response times while enhancing their capabilities in the field.

2. Use ECM to develop a roadmap. Things to consider include:

• Adoption and buy-in rates for an investment – If you can pick technology and processes to impact, why not choose the ones that will impact the greatest number of people or processes first?
• Lowering your total cost of ownership (TCO) and enhancing your return on investment (ROI) –What projects will reduce the TCO while enhancing your ROI? In bad budget times, every dollar counts.
• Prioritizing projects and available funding – Some funding streams survive or increase – even today. Perhaps your roadmap should start in a department with available funding. Those investments can then be leveraged over time by other departments.

3. Meet the needs and challenges of your organization. These issues include:

• Reduced staff – Reductions in government rarely come with less work. With ECM, you can manage the same amount of work with less staff.
• Funding cuts – Losing funding may mean that you must change the way you run a program. ECM reduces administrative burdens by eliminating slow, paper-based processes that consume time and budget.
• Constituent demands – The relationship between constituents and government can be a key reason for implementing projects, especially for things like transparency, online services and faster/easier processes.
• Compliance problems – When documents are lost or processes don’t follow required procedures, your agency may perform poorly on audits. If this has happened, a starting point could be an ECM solution – it’s a signal to your auditors that you’ve taken their findings seriously and are addressing their concerns using workflow automation and document management.

In each of these cases, technology like ECM or document management can help government craft a roadmap for upcoming IT projects. And with that roadmap, a new type of government can be created – one that is digital, automated and paperless.

Top 5 Ways to Justify IT Investments

// November 7th, 2012 // 1 Comment » // Government, IT // Terri Jones

I’ve had moments when I was so excited about the potential of a new IT project that I couldn’t wait to get it started. And, after dedicating time to the procurement, RFP, review, negotiation and contract process, who wouldn’t look forward to doing the actual work? But, before you roll up your sleeves, there’s one more bit of planning to do. Take a step back and think a few years down the road – what impact will this investment have on your IT budget today and in the future?

According to IT analysts, today’s government IT directors must also be business managers. That is, they need to be ready to make the case for spending budget dollars. In the old days, we could say we bought this and that without question; but today, in the hyper-attentive world of government, we must answer much more fundamental questions:

• Why did you spend this money?
• What difference will your IT investment make?
• How will it improve government and increase constituent services?

Being able to measure and explain the impact of your IT investments will have on your organization’s operations is key to protecting your budget and getting support from managers and elected officials. So, how can you measure the impact of your investments and communicate it consistently and effectively to management?

Here are five ideas to keep in mind:

1. Baselines are important – Don’t let the excitement of starting a project prevent you from documenting what things are like before you fix them with your new IT solution. For example, if you’re implementing an enterprise content management (ECM) system, you must establish a baseline to show the impact your solution will provide. Cost considerations include the amount of money spent on paper, printing and storage as well as the time it takes staff to file, search and process documents. Estimates are okay, too. Include things like how long it takes to retrieve a paper document, the duration of phone calls when retrieving information and estimates of how often documents are lost. These are the real measures of what absorbs government budgets and staff time – time and money that could be better spent serving your constituents.
2. Ask your users – Establishing baselines is only the beginning. You also must talk with users in each department as you roll out your solution. Users know what takes up too much of their time and can identify the barriers they typically face. Their feedback will help you make the new solution more responsive to their needs and intuitive to use. Although most formal discovery processes involve some users, I believe ongoing discussions with user groups are essential. Include users at the start of configuration and continue through acceptance testing, refinements and expansions so you lay the groundwork for it to be effective for use every day.
3. Consider related effects – Early on, your solution might pay off in basic cost savings. However, it’s also important to take into account other benefits of you solution – such as reduced backlogs, the ability to conduct more inspections and caseworker interviews in a day as well as more constituent self-service opportunities like submitting electronic forms online. And, because digital documents can be accessed on tablets and smartphones, your field staff can be truly mobile and more effective, too.
4. The hard and soft – Sometimes, managers are told to calculate the return on investment (ROI) in hard costs (as mentioned in the baseline section) while others focus on the soft costs – i.e. the related effects of solutions. You should keep track of both. In government, constituent service can’t be measured in hard costs alone – sometimes, it’s the extra social service interview you complete each day that truly changes someone’s life for the better.
5. The annual report – The length of your counting period may vary, but your accountability should not. Every year, volunteering to educate your elected officials, managers and users about the progress and impact of your ECM solution assures that the value of the solution you are supporting and expanding is widely known, despite election cycles and changes in staff. Call it your annual report. Your persistence will help when you need to purchase, expand or even pay your solution’s maintenance bill each year.

It’s always been government’s responsibility to explain how and why they spend their constituents’ money. This isn’t always easy to figure out given the work government does, but it is essential. By doing so, you can justify why you invested in an IT solution to managers and elected officials and accurately convey the positive impact it’s had on staff and constituents, paving the way for future IT investments that will provide a consistent ROI.