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GCN Home > 11/06/06 issue

Va. DMV excavates backlog

SPECIAL REPORT: State & Local Innovations | New document imaging system improves efficiency, access

By Kerri Hostetler, GCN Staff

The Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles knows a lot about bottlenecks and backups, and not just the kind on the roads. Until recently, employees handling DMV’s records were stuck in a 2.5 million-document backlog that stretched, in terms of time, six months or more.

But a new digital document imaging system, which replaced an old microfilm system, has eliminated the paper pile-up.

“This is the next best thing to sliced bread. It’s awesome,” said Theresa Gonyo, Virginia DMV’s director of data management. “I’ve worked on a lot of projects since being here, but nothing that quite measures up to this. It’s phenomenal.”

Direct access

The new enterprise content management system lets workers at customer service centers, DMV Select locations and online dealer centers process paperwork and scan documents directly into the system. rather than shipping them to headquarters to be microfilmed, officials said.

The department processes 8 million to 10 million licensing, titling and other documents annually. Efficiency was a problem with the old microfilm system, officials said.

With the new system, Information Access Systems Inc. of Orlando, Fla., eliminated the department’s backlog of 2.5 million documents in nine months.

The old system required workers to send documentation such as driver’s license applications, titles, conviction and accident reports, and undelivered mail—each of which could be a paper document, e-mail or fax—to DMV headquarters.

At headquarters, documents would be microfilmed, then destroyed. The microfilm would be manually indexed and stored, which led to problems.

“We were losing documents and making data entry errors,” Gonyo said.

Retrieving information stored on microfilm was difficult, too. Internal users at DMV work centers and field offices, and external users such as law enforcement and insurance agencies, attorneys and titling services, required DMV to retrieve and research documents daily, Gonyo said.

“We could never find the documents we needed, and when we did ... we’d have to copy it several times before we got one we could use,” Gonyo said.

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



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