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SPECIAL REPORT: State & Local Innovations | Persistence, planning and people skills brought imaging system to reality

By David Essex, Special to GCN

Government, ideally, is where people work together toward common goals. But too often, interagency rivalry and lack of communication thwart cooperation, leading to inefficient, stovepiped systems.

That’s the situation Keith Fournier stepped into in 2001 when he became chief information officer for the 47 agencies and elective offices, and 4,400 employees of Lucas County in northwest Ohio, seated in Toledo.

Fournier discovered that nine county agencies were planning their own imaging systems to scan, store and track documents electronically. “I told my administrator, ‘We can’t put nine different systems on our network—it’ll crush our network, and I don’t have the people,’ ” Fournier said.

As a certified project manager, he understood the importance of executive buy-in and of identifying a high-level champion. In government, it’s all the better if the champion is an elected official. Fournier teamed with Bernie Quilter, the county’s clerk of courts. The two convinced the county administration to consolidate on a centralized enterprise content management (ECM) system. “It took three years of me hitting the streets,” Fournier said.

After an internal team established requirements, Fournier sent out a performance-based request for proposals.

“The classic RFP process is perfect for ordering commodities,” said Greg Boyd, president of Results Engineering in Columbus, Ohio, the consultant and system integrator for the project.

But this one had a number of unusual criteria, such as the ability to accommodate multiple agencies, and proof of engineers’ certification on PeopleSoft, Cisco and other mission-critical components.

“It was the biggest RFP response we ever made,” Boyd said. The subsequent product search led to OnBase from Hyland Software Inc. of Westlake, near Cleveland.

County approval

With the backing of the county manager, Fournier asked two things of participating agencies: to establish a paperless process called day-forward imaging, and perform “back-file conversion” of existing documents.

Fournier, who has been with the county for 11 years, started as a geographic information systems analyst, an experience that helped with the ECM system. “In scope and size, it’s not that different from enterprise GIS, where you try to establish one mapping standard for the county, and you do it once and use many times,” he said.

With all document systems, a key step is developing a taxonomy: standard phrasing for documents types and terms within documents (think of the many ways to show birth dates and addresses). Results Engineering created a methodology and software for the purpose, called Doxonomy, which reduced the number of keywords from more than 2,400 to about 240.

The infrastructure behind the ECM system is heavy on networked storage, gigabit bandwidth and online software. Image files are saved in industry standard, non-encrypted TIFF Group IV instead of a vendor-specific format that might not wear well in the future.

More news on related topics: Business Process Management, Content / Record Management, E-Government, Management, State & Local



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