Hyland Software's Document Management Blog

Why the Latest and Greatest is Important – Software, Maintenance and Enhancements

// September 14th, 2012 // No Comments » // Affordable Housing, Cloud Computing, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Federal Government, Finance & Administration, Government, Health & Human Services, IT, Justice & Public Safety, Mobile, Public Works, Software as a Service, State and Local Government // Terri Jones

Next week, I’ll be attending the OnBase Training & Technology Conference (OTTC). During my time in government, I went to many users’ conferences, mostly out of self-defense. I viewed these events as a chance to lobby for the enhancements and improvements I needed for my department. Unfortunately, the process for discussing these needs was often missing or contentious.

When I reflect on these experiences, I realize it’s essential for government to have an avenue for asking software vendors about their processes for product development, enhancements and bug fixes before investing in an IT solution.

Knowing what I know now, here’s what I would ask vendors:

1.       Do you have a users’ conference?

Users’ conferences are essential in order for you to develop an understanding about how much support you’ll receive once the sale is close. At OTTC, for example, users meet with colleagues to discuss trends and best practices. They can also participate in more than 200 sessions focusing on solutions and industry trends.

To ensure your vendor supports your solution after sale, ask these questions:

• If there’s no user conference, how can I network and discuss issues of common concern with other agencies?
• If there is a user conference, does it offer product and technical sessions for new features and functionalities?
• Is there a virtual community for agencies that can’t travel so users can still network?

2.       What is the process for collecting customer-driven enhancements and how do you evaluate them for inclusion?

Enhancements are essential for government solutions, especially for those who have to respond to changing regulatory environments and own solutions connected to state or federal funders. You also need to discuss enhancements that are not regulatory in function to determine if they’re ranked for priority within the user community.

3.       How often do you provide new versions of the solution? Is it included in maintenance?

Asking about the release schedule and the frequency of new versions is important for your future IT budget. Too often, you pay maintenance for technical support and still have to pay for solution upgrades – or both. This could potentially have severe budget implications for government agencies that may be faced with the choice of keeping their solution and cutting other funding, using an outdated system or eliminating the solution entirely. By reviewing the frequency of updates, along with the provider’s research and development investments, you’ll be able to evaluate whether the solution can service your agency today and in the future.

4.       Do you have examples of government trends you’ve responded to in past solution releases?

Even though agencies don’t frequently make large purchases, that doesn’t mean they don’t need cutting-edge tools. Today, agencies are looking for process automation, easy integration of IT systems, mobile solutions, self-service features and web options as well as flexible licensing and cloud, or hosted deployments. Asking vendors this question will help you evaluate whether they can be a partner that helps you spot useful trends and tools or provide expansion options for your investment.

Overall, the latest and greatest IT solutions solve your needs now and in the future. By asking vendors these questions, you’ll learn how they think about their solution and how they’ll respond to your future needs. That, in turn, will help you make the wisest IT choice – one that will serve your agency beyond your current needs.

Capture Isn’t Just a Scanner – Four Capture Strategies for Government

// September 11th, 2012 // No Comments » // Affordable Housing, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Federal Government, Finance & Administration, Government, Health & Human Services, IT, Justice & Public Safety, Mobile, Public Works, State and Local Government, Uncategorized, Workflow // Terri Jones

When I designed my government agency’s document management solution, I gave little thought to my capture strategy. I was busy trying to design workflows, add document types and create eForms. I bought two large scanners to electronically capture documents and that was that.

Now, several years later, government agencies are re-thinking how they capture documents. Technology offers more options and staff reductions have made it critical to eliminate any manual tasks during the capture process. Moreover, several initiatives – such as transparency, mobile document access and self-service – require government to continually expand the type of documents digitized. The capture of documents, once less complicated, is now at the forefront and a critical element of enterprise content management (ECM).

In order for government to respond to new trends and realities, here are four ways to think about capture:

1.       Align your capture strategy with the way staff works – With so many capture options – electronic forms, machine print forms, paperless processes, etc. – the capture strategy will look different depending on the tasks and the particular way staff need to do their job. Choosing tools that fit in seamlessly with existing technology will be easier for staff to learn and can be leveraged in other departments across your enterprise.

2.       Plan for high volume, but don’t forget low volume – In my agency, the scanner was the single point of capture and it was meant to do thousands of pages a day. But what about the daily trickle of information that most staff handles that also needs to be captured in your ECM system? Be mindful of information like vendor invoices and human services eligibility documents that get captured by staff in places convenient to them.

3.       Carefully consider the intake location – When your agency has many locations, efficiently capturing documents adds another wrinkle to your strategy. If documents are received in many places and reviewed/used in other areas, capturing the information as soon as possible is critical. By doing so, you’ll ensure the documents are available to everyone who needs them. Immediately capturing documents also saves time and money that may have been used to ship documents to a central location for filing or scanning.

4.       Other initiatives may drive your capture – Oftentimes, government utilizes ECM for other initiatives, such as meeting public records requests, providing documents online for constituent self-service and field access for employees. By expanding the reach of your document management solution with capture abilities, you can position your agency to move forward on these efforts – all while driving down costs associated with manual filing and paper storage.

Whether you just implemented an ECM solution or have been using one for some time, capturing documents requires more than simply buying a scanner. Considering the points above will lead to a successful flow of tasks that your agency can easily adopt and, with more and more documents being captured, increase efficiencies and support the critical initiatives of a more effective and transparent government.

Faster, Cheaper, Better Government – Part 2: Start with the Basics, 5 Ways to Be Faster

// July 30th, 2012 // No Comments » // Affordable Housing, Back Office, Document Management, Federal Government, Finance & Administration, Government, Health & Human Services, IT, Justice & Public Safety, Mobile, Public Works, State and Local Government, Uncategorized, Workflow // Terri Jones

In Part 1 of this series, I discussed my experiences at the Cityworks conference in the context of the historical and continuous reductions in the number of public sector jobs. Despite these staggering job losses, I believe government leadership can transform this bad moment into a watershed for creating the “faster, cheaper, better government” model.

The topic is both important and broad, so let’s start at the beginning with some examples of “faster” government, including:

Providing quicker responses – Government operates faster when information is easy to retrieve. However, when needed information resides in separate databases or filing cabinets, it takes longer to find answers. Since most government information is split between departments and locations, connecting people with information is essential for faster retrieval.

Reducing backlogs – The unfortunate result of a reduced workforce is that less work is done in a day. The good news is that organizations can cope by changing the way they operate – eliminating tasks like printing, copying and filing. By eliminating manual tasks, staff has more time to provide better, faster service to constituents.

Making faster decisions – Increased and backlogged workloads results in slower decision making. Constituents become very unhappy when delayed decisioning slows down critical progress for things like providing shelter for the homeless, emergency assistance during a crisis and the development of businesses that can help the community’s local economy. You can relieve backlogs and improve the reputation of your government by using technology to track and act quickly on these services.

Here are five ways to get your government operating faster:

1. Easy information access – By connecting documents and data with codeless integration, you put all needed information at your staffs’ fingertips.
2. Focus on exceptions – One way to operate with a reduced staff is to use technology like workflow automation.  Because workflow automates repetitive processes, staff has more time to focus on the human side of work. Not only will it shine a light on the places staff should focus their time, it also highlights problems and bottlenecks in your processes.
3. Eliminate tasks – By implementing technology that automates processes, your staff doesn’t spend time printing, copying and filing paper. They now have to time to focus on more important initiatives and deliver faster responses to constituents.
4. Reduce the number of solutions you support – One way to accelerate the use of technology is to reduce the complexity of your systems. You can accomplish this by implementing solutions that are easier and cheaper to support, and buying enterprise solutions that can be used in other departments and for different processes. By reducing the number of solutions, you also reduce the amount of IT support needed to administer your solutions. It’s like having extra staff that is free to develop additional solutions and realize more benefits, faster.
5. Provide self-service – Let your constituents help themselves! This isn’t bad customer service – it’s government using technology the way constituents want to be served, with 24/7 access to information. Since constituents can help themselves, your staff can address other tasks.

Faster government is critical for surviving the current crisis and meeting the expectations of the next generation of constituents. Technology will get you there by realigning the way your staff uses their time. And when that happens, government will not only be faster, but cheaper and better.

The Key to a Successful ACO: Access to Information

// July 16th, 2012 // No Comments » // Enterprise content management, Federal Government, Healthcare, IT, Uncategorized // Dan West

An accountable care organization (ACO) is the ultimate balancing act of fiscal responsibility and patient care. According to an announcement on July 9^th by the Center for Medicaid and Medicare, 89 more organizations have taken up the challenge of striking that balance.

But to accomplish this goal, participating organizations need to be able to quickly share clinical and administrative information to other members of the ACO. Otherwise they risk over-utilizing services and creating financial challenges.

By deploying an enterprise content management (ECM) solution in participating organizations, ACOs can have that free-flow of information they need to continue supplying high quality care in a fiscally responsible way.

ECM takes all of your organization’s content, from paper to clinical images to the patient chart, and stores it all in a single, central database. It also integrates with your existing HIT investments to pull and share information between them. This means information is instantly retrievable from any of those applications – making the lives of clinicians and staff much easier by creating a continuity of information across the organization.

But ECM does much more than just capture and retrieval. It also automates the movement of that content to direct it to the right people at the right time, removing redundant tasks like forwarding information. This isn’t confined within the walls of a single organization either, as information and content can be shared between hospitals and other healthcare organizations, making it perfect for keeping information flowing within ACOs. Sharp Healthcare certainly thought so.

Sharp Community Medical Group, Sharp Rees-Stealy Medical Centers and a selected group of Anthem Blue Cross of California PPO members are participating in a commercial ACO pilot in the San Diego area. The goal is for providers to deliver better coordinated care to their patients, with a focus on prevention and chronic care management. The healthcare organizations are currently working through medical management processes, which include physicians receiving authorization for referrals for their PPO member patients from Anthem. Once the solution is in place, Sharp will need to easily exchange case, disease and utilization management information and images with Anthem, explained Cathy Fuhrman, manager of information systems at Sharp HealthCare. The ECM system will take images incoming to Sharp and make them available in the member’s chart through an e-business application.

This allows all of the clinical and administrative patient information to be accessible to all participants in the ACO, eliminating the opportunity for utilization of services.

“If we don’t know that this person has chronic diseases or we don’t have all the images together for that person, we’re not going to meet our financial and clinical goals,” Fuhrman said. “If the patient is managed appropriately, we can get the patient to the right provider.”

That statement describes perfectly the importance of accessibility of participating organization’s content to an ACO’s success.  And ECM is the critical application that makes that exchange of information possible.

Public Records Perils – Transparency Lets You See the Solution

// May 16th, 2012 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Federal Government, Government, State and Local Government // Terri Jones

One positive effect of transparency in the public sector is that it gives city and county government an opportunity to assess current practices and make needed changes. Given the increase in public records requests and the scrutiny from the White House on down to the local level, there is no doubt constituents want more access to public records while government expectations increase.

To tackle this situation, let’s say that your government entity decided to use an enterprise content management (ECM) system to digitize records and now wants to:

• Meet public record requests efficiently
• Track formal requests
• Implement these practices with a reduced staff

Here’s how you meet these goals:

Satisfy public requests fast and efficiently using ECM
Those of us who work in government know that we have divisions, departments and offices – with many different and often separate areas – that do the work every day. But to our constituents, we are just “the state,” “the county” or “the city,” and when they request public records they do not see the divisions we created behind the scenes. In fact, the documents they request are stored and maintained by many different staffs and offices, which presents difficulties in identifying, locating and assembling the documents that meet each request.

This is the problem with physical paper files – government pays to create, file and store documents and eventually destroys them. It’s time to digitize these records and eliminate the costs associated with paper documents to speed up and improve the tools at your disposal to retrieve and assemble public records.

With an ECM solution, digitizing records and storing them is shared by the entire government entity, which means searching in ONE place to find them. This is a big effort, but it has significant benefits in terms of long-term cost savings and efficiency in meeting the requests of our citizens. As we reassess seemingly everything in this climate of budget and staff reductions, the method of storing and retrieving public records needs analysis and fortunately, the answer has already been proven in government with ECM.

Track requests efficiently with automation
With pressure to complete requests within legal requirements and standards, tracking formal public records requests evolved from paper to spreadsheets. Manual systems were put in place to track when the request arrived, who’s compiling records, who’s requesting them, when they are due, etc. However, these manual methods can be eliminated – along with the extra work of logging entries – by letting workflow automation route requests, time their fulfillment, compile the documents into packets, redact confidential information and even send electronically to the requestor. Staff is notified of new requests and those in need of immediate attention. That way, deadlines are easily met without worrying about fines or other penalties for noncompliance.

Utilize self-service options for 24/7 constituent access
Now that your records are available in a digital format, you can utilize self-service options provided by an ECM solution. For more casual searches – things like board agendas and minutes, contracts and court documents – records can be made available through a search function on your website. With more formal requests made like those under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the Sunshine Law, an electronic form on your website easily collects these requests, reducing phone calls to your staff while providing 24/7 options for requestors. Then, E-Forms automatically route through your review and fulfillment process with timers to ensure that no requests slip through the cracks and all needs are met within legal timeframes.

The neat thing about moving to digital records for transparency reasons is that it lets you see through the paper to support public records efficiently and conveniently while expanding the services you offer constituents. Now that’s getting more done with less!

Mobile Solutions: Helping Savvy Insurers Improve Profitability

// May 11th, 2012 // No Comments » // Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Federal Government, Insurance, IT, Mobile, Uncategorized // Troy Gross

Let’s face it. Insurance companies aren’t known for enthusiastically embracing new technologies. In the face of ever-changing regulatory requirements, an unstable economy and a more demanding consumer base, convincing an insurance CFO to invest in new technology solutions presents a formidable challenge for even a seasoned negotiator.

Savvy insurers will realize, however, that survival and success depends largely on their willingness to innovate. One such innovation whose time has come in insurance is mobile solutions; in fact, according to the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the market for tablet PCs grew 207 percent in 2011 while smartphones grew by 63 percent. Mobile solutions are key components of any growth strategy…and we’re not talking about passing Blackberries out to employees and agents.

A Simple Equation
Insurance companies have to do a better job of managing risk, controlling expense, creating new products and attracting profitable customers. Mobile solutions are an integral part of achieving these initiatives. They help improve profitability through top-line enhancement and cost containment and help save money, mitigate risk, and increase productivity. Mobile solutions can also attract new customers, retain current policyholders and help insurers tap into new markets with new products.

Revenues
In addition to shedding risky customers, forward-thinking insurers proactively retain and attract the most profitable policyholders. In today’s competitive marketplace, this requires the insurer to empower its field force and agent producers with the tools to capture business at/or near the point of sale. By extending capabilities to mobile devices, insurers augment and support existing lifecycle processes, from new business/underwriting to claims. With anywhere, anytime access to visual representations (illustrations, loss control, damage estimation) or forms-based and repeatable applications (application submissions, loss reports), staff keep processes moving – whether online or offline.

Key revenue advantages gained from mobile solutions include:

• Shortens cycle times for new business capture
• Speeds information sharing and better visibility into processes
• Improves attraction and retention of next-generation agent producers
• Reduces costs and time associated with completing and signing paper-based documents
• Minimizes the risk of information being lost or improperly entered into other systems
• Strengthens brand value

Costs
Cost containment is a key driver for an insurer’s business strategy regardless of the unknown long-term effects today’s downturned economic conditions and increased government regulations may have. But, a sustained, sluggish economy creates apprehensive consumers. And, while softening prices – either directly or through discounted bundling – have been somewhat successful in minimizing policyholder fears they’ve resulted in declining revenues and are unsustainable in the long run.  Unprecedented levels of government-imposed legislation and regulations impact profitability as well, with insurers continually facing an evolving host of legal requirements from state insurance boards as well as federal oversight. Given this reality, in order to maintain profitability, insurers must focus on increasing operational efficiencies and decreasing expenses.

Mobile technologies provide real opportunities for cost containment, including:

• Improved response rates achieved though instant access to forms, loss notices or documents
• Increased effectiveness by eliminating redundant tasks, as evidence such as photos, videos, voice recordings, diagrams or signed documents are captured onsite and uploaded to the system
• Decreased time and risks around transferring information from the field to the underwriter or the home office
• Reduced dependence on expensive air/wireless cards due to the ability to work offline

While the insurance sector has historically been conservative in adopting new technology, mobile technology seems ideally positioned to help today’s insurers establish a competitive advantage. By implementing mobile technologies to address two major challenges – controlling costs and attracting profitable customers to increase revenues – will position insurers to succeed in a highly-demanding, evolving industry.

The White House on Records Management: ‘We Can’t Wait’

// November 29th, 2011 // No Comments » // Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Affordable Housing, Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Federal Government, Finance & Administration, Government, Health & Human Services, Human Resources, Justice & Public Safety, Public Works, State and Local Government // Terri Jones

“Records management can’t wait,” President Barack Obama told the federal government agencies yesterday, via presidential memorandum. It’s likely the federal government could learn a lot from state and local government agencies who have already embraced records management. Maybe you can, too.

The president hopes to transform federal agencies and create more transparency. How this will happen is captured in a White House blog post titled “We Can’t Wait: Bringing Records Management into the Twenty-First Century.”

It is a great post, but I believe it’s possible many readers will overlook a small – but important – phrase:

“…The [Records Management] Directive will focus on maintaining accountability to the American public through documenting agency actions; increasing efficiency (and thus reducing costs); and switching, where feasible, from paper-based records to electronic records.”

In those few words highlighted above, the enterprise content management (ECM) community rejoices. Why? Because ECM is a valuable tool for government, and it is an investment that should be made at every level of government, even in this time of severe budget reductions.

You see, the flexibility of a good ECM solution means the solution can become a tool for many government departments and initiatives. Understanding this, thousands of cities and counties across the country have already embraced electronic records and ECM, and have used the solution to meet a number of needs. We can see the result:

• Reduced costs. From eliminating paper and file cabinets to the costs of storing and moving files.
• Reclaiming staff time. No more searching for files, no lost documents, no filing, printing or photocopying.
• Speeding up government. Workflow automation shaves days off of processes; physical paper files replaced with electronic allow more staff to simultaneously access information.
• Connecting documents and data. Easy information retrieval helps make the transition from paper files to electronic records easy and intuitive for users, and requires little or no staff training.

At the same time, the ECM investment lays the foundation for meeting transparency and open government initiatives, while realizing all of the lowered costs and efficiency government organizations need to survive. So, access to records can take place through a website or a kiosk or a computer station at an office, improving constituent service while reducing the staff time needed to fill requests.

The good news for federal agencies is that they need look no farther than the counties and cities who have invested in an ECM solution. Other counties and cities who are considering an ECM solution can similarly find ideas and proven value thanks to the examples of their peers.

Current government ECM users show that creating transparency is just one of the benefits of moving to electronic records. So, while federal agencies may make this transition to meet a presidential memorandum on Open Government, their efforts could end up improving government operations, reducing costs and reclaiming staff time for the important work they do. The proof is in the results of cities and counties who have already moved to include ECM as one of their IT tools.