document management - Ending the Horror of Heaps

If Gary Agira’s story were a movie, the story would include the Ugandan IT Systems Analyst navigating government bureaucracy, stubborn workers, and perhaps most dramatically, a national registry and warehouse overflowing with 34 million government documents—to bring them all into the digital world. It’d be a charmingly idiosyncratic story, but still a universal one: document management as a metaphor for progress, with Agira’s unwavering belief in the power of technology as he moves a nation and a workforce into the digital age.

But this isn’t a movie, and the real Gary Agira is the IT Systems Analyst for Uganda’s Privatization & Utility Sector Reform Project (PUSRP). The PUSRP is the department of the Ministry of Finance and Planning charged with the epic task of overhauling the way the African nation archives, stores and perhaps most profoundly of all, actually works with records to support the divestiture and reform of 42 public enterprises. It’s all part of an initiative to move Uganda’s economy forward.

On paper, the PUSRP’s mission was simple: to provide an information management infrastructure to support improved commercial and utility services through divesting and restructuring public enterprises like telecom, energy, water and transport by increasing private sector participation using document imaging software.

But the paper itself that needed to be archived and managed, well, that’s what Agira refers to as “the horror of the heaps.” The national registry overflowed with 10 million documents, which, owing to an inconsistent filing system, led to information silos and misplaced documents. Then there was the massive national warehouse, located 20 minutes away. “That’s 20 minutes on our roads,” Agira laughs. “These aren’t four-lane highways.” There, another 24 million documents were precariously housed, subject to water from burst pipes, exposure, and perhaps most memorably, “vermin damage.” Yes, rats were eating the paper.

In short, there was a need for document management, even if no one knew that’s what it was called yet. “There was a lack of know-how of modern document management techniques,” Agira sighs. Librarians held a monopoly on information. Representatives from the national government viewed document management as a librarian’s task and not a part of business processes. “There was a lack of collective ownership,” he says.

Agira lobbied his administrators with pictures of workers searching for records in the national warehouse, protected by makeshift hazmat suits. Finally, after a few false starts, he secured funding for the much-needed system and, by 2005, the search was on. Agira carefully assembled a team, including government sceptics, as he puts it, “to experience document management as a group.

Agira and his team looked at half a dozen options and agreed on Laserfiche’s document imaging. “It was easier, it was faster and we got more functionality for our money,” he explains.

Special Benefits for Special Education

College Station Independent School District (CSISD) in College Station, TX, needed a more efficient way to manage content for its Special Services Department to provide students with timely, specialized assistance. “Everything we do is designed to ensure that the special education student is on the same playing field as a regular education student,” stresses Technical Assistant Nancy Boller, who is responsible for maintaining compliant student records.

The confidential information contained in a special education student’s file is vital to CSISD’s special education teachers. “It’s important that those working with students in Special Services understand what modifications need to be in place and what each student needs to succeed in class. That information resides in our students’ files, so maintaining them properly is a top priority for us.”

With an overflowing amount of paperwork, stored offsite as well as taking up space onsite, keeping these confidential records organized, secure and easily accessible was a massive problem. “I used to get paper cuts and a strained neck from sorting through boxes for hours to satisfy a request for information,” says Boller.

Costly Paper Trails

“We’re required to keep our students’ files for seven years after they leave our district,” Boller explains. As a result, the department housed thousands of inactive files in offsite storage—costing several thousand dollars a year instead of using a Document Imaging system.

“Annual placement review meeting reports alone can be anywhere from 10-30 pages long. Some students are in the district from age three until age 22, so they get reviewed 18 or 19 times,” Boller explains. “The bulk of content we have to manage, just in our inactive files, is incredible.”
In addition to yearly placement meeting reports, each student’s file includes federally protected information such as:

Special Education testing (required every three years).

Medical records.

Disciplinary information.

To satisfy requests for information, Special Services staff used to go to the warehouse and search through boxes, or, in some cases, warehouse staff would bring 10-15 boxes from the offsite storage room to the department so that staff could sort through them to find the requested information. Once located, the department made copies of the entire file (sometimes hundreds of pages) and paid to mail it to the requesting school district. “At $5 or $6 a package, the cost adds up,” Boller says.

Transition to Technology

After learning about Laserfiche enterprise content management (ECM) Document Management Software from an employee in the purchasing warehouse, the Special Services Department acquired bids from two other content management providers and then evaluated the software during demos and presentations. “We needed a solution that would not only keep our records safe and accessible, but would also be easy to use for a variety of staff. Laserfiche was the best fit for our needs,” Boller says.

“At first I was a little skeptical,” she admits, explaining that some of the long-time employees were especially hesitant to switch to digitized content. “But we received lots of help from SMARTfiles, our Laserfiche reseller. Scanning in all the files was faster and easier than I expected, and the end results of using Laserfiche’s Document Management make it well worth the investment of both time and money.”

Prepared for the Unexpected

While Laserfiche is able to reduce CSISD’s paper clutter and provide instant, secure access to student records, Boller brings up another interesting benefit of implementation. “In our region, we have to keep in mind that natural disasters occur. For instance, some schools lost all their paper records when Hurricane Ike came though.”

In order to create new or replacement files for special education students, the students must be retested. Retesting can take anywhere from four to 12 hours—not including the time it takes to do the paperwork. To get a child into the Special Services system, Boller says it can take as long as 60 days.

“Digital files aren’t as fragile as paper,” Boller says. “With Laserfiche and Document Management, we don’t have to worry that our students will lose ground after a natural disaster.”