Win-win situations are not good enough for information technology staff in Marshall, part of Minnesota’s Lyon County. They’ve got to have win-win, win-win. That’s because the Marshall school district, its city hall, municipal utility department and the Lyon County government all have built their IT infrastructures around document management with Laserfiche. So when one part of the quartet undertakes improvements to Laserfiche, everybody benefits—and it seems that document images software improvements aren’t stopping any time soon.
“That’s the thing about document management solutions,” 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.
“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.”
“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.”
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.
Since, moving forward with Laserfiche, The Marshall Portal has been able to offer a one-stop access to information. The value of moving ahead with this technology has given a quick return on investment, the opportunity to gain experience and level of comfort with document imaging.
For more information of document management software, please visit: www.laserfiche.com
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