Episode 031: The CIO’s Worst Nightmare. And Something About Dilbert.

Thanks for joining us today. My name is Kevin Ledgister, your host and today we’re discussing government trends in information technology. With me today is Kevin Albrecht, who is a Senior Customer Advisor for government at Hyland Software and also Paul Gorman, who is a former CIO for several government agencies and also a former colleague of Kevin Albrecht and is now working with state agencies for ImageSoft. So welcome Kevin and Paul.

It can be something as simple as, we will always have to accept paper documents. That’s just going to have to happen, and government agencies are going to have to receive that. But that doesn’t mean that we have to then manage the evaluation and the sharing of those documents in a manual manner. We can transform them into something digital and add workflow and process improvements to it. So it’s really figuring out what your specific pain point is, whether that’s capturing information or process automation or case management analytics. Really identifying that for your agency and then seeing what changes you need to make to bring efficiency.

When I was a CIO 20 years ago, we had an aspirational mission statement… with any system anywhere at any time. And for us, that meant we needed to be able to have our systems accessible by our staff at anytime from anywhere. That was all of course getting our systems web-based really. Today I would want to expand that; I would want it to be any content, anywhere on any device. And for me, I think for a government agency, if I were the CIO sitting in a government agency, digital transformation would be the ability of my agency to conduct our business from anywhere. And for that you would need content, processes and collaboration essentially to be ubiquitous to the constituents that you’re serving. We might not get there right away, it’s aspirational.

And I think sometimes we can point out, well when you have file folders of papers sitting on a shelf. That’s completely not secure although it might not be hacked by foreign adversaries. But there’s no auditability, there’s no reporting on it. But what are your thoughts about how security fits in with digital transformation?

I had an employee a number of years ago, was in an auto accident and was carrying loan files in the back of the truck and the loan files wound up all over the road. That was a major incident for us. We had to figure out what loans were affected, contact the customers, it’s not a very pleasant experience. And if you can’t control the information and have auditability of that information, you’re really not the one, you can’t be responsible for it. You have no way to be responsible for it.

Having remote staff and staff working out of the office increasingly makes it a requirement that you digitize the content that they’re working with. You just cannot afford to have remote staff carrying files through the state.

A lot of the times we’re asked about the need for different types of certifications, and there seems to be a desire like there’s just one master type of software certification that covers them all. What are some of the certifications that you’ve run into or do you have kind of any advice for anybody of what they should be looking at?

I mean frankly I think it should be an audit fine. And I think eventually that’s going to start becoming an audit finding. I just don’t believe at this point that the legitimate excuse in any level of government not to understand the risk and the likelihood of compromise.

The savings are essentially, they’re career-enhancing. Literally, the benefits are obvious, as you said the single platform that’s secure, standardized development environment, you could actually implement now rapid solution developments, platforms like OnBase, you have lower operating costs, lower support costs. I mean you wind up being essentially a financial superstar for the agency if you can put together that strategy.

So whether you’re managing a process like constituents applying for a benefit or you’re doing asset management, like keeping track of the county snowplows. When you have all that content in one shared system and you’re able to then integrate on the backend with whatever relevant backend system there is, you’re not having to log in to different systems, you need to see the fraud investigation of a constituent or you just need to look into the processing of their different applications or whatever that might be. You can do it seamlessly and again when we talk about security, how these things are all tied together, how you’re able to look at the content in the context that you need to see it and not going in there logging in to certainly multiple systems or having to walk to another building to open a file cabinet to pull the information that you’re looking for.

And the new point solution might solve some of the IT problems, but they wind up creating an information silo or continuing an information silo. And from that constituent service issues are going to develop.

When I say that, someone does, with the department of transportation and they’re keeping track of maintenance on bridges, their job every day isn’t to go just do maintenance on bridges or do bridge inspections. Their job is to keep the road safe. That’s why they go to work every day. So when they’re messing with kind of siloed, disparate places of information that just slows them down and prohibits them from doing their job as efficiently as they could.

But then also things looking like mobile applications where maybe someone’s not filling out nine pages of content on their phone, but simply being able to do things like notifying your government agency that there’s been a change of address.

I got married and capturing a picture of my marriage certificate and there’s been a change of my name or things like that. Really allowing me as a constituent to interact with you in the way that’s most comfortable for me, but also allows you to provide that digital transformation, those process enhancements on the backend.

When I always say that the ultimate in a digital transformation for content services is you don’t want your workers spending time processing cases where everything is correct. If they’ve gone through and everyone has provided what they needed and they qualify for the program or that everything is in order and they spend a bunch of time processing that, that time often is wasted. What we want to be able to do is process, check those things electronically and digitally and get it to a final point where maybe someone’s just signing off and then our workers can look at the more complicated things that need human touch and human eyes.

I think for me the reason I think forms create problems for government agencies is that agencies don’t plan on the differences between forms.

Not all forms are alike, so it’s unlikely that a single form tool is ever going to solve all of your form problems. So for me, the first thing you got to figure out is what is the purpose for the form and then gather data to transmit data. Are you capturing process results? Are you driving a process? Are you logging work? I mean I could keep going on and on about this.

But for me the biggest differences are between the internal focus, the external focus, internally controlled, externally controlled but also process-connected versus data-connected or some mixture of the two.

If you need to feed databases, common-sense thing. If the purpose of this form is to feed an internal database, well you better have a form product that allows you to extract form data.

I’ve seen situations where that was indeed the purpose of the form and the form product they chose didn’t let them do that. If you need to capture and preserve signatures as evidence, the chances are very good your form product had probably not be revisable. I mean you have to control the form after somebody signed it. There’s so much to this.

Your legal requirements probably need to be checked before you pick a form product. Putting on my lawyer’s hat for just a second, you could actually put a form product in place that would be a violation of the laws surrounding the purpose of the form. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that could probably happen even today. So yeah, I liked the idea of having multiple form products to address the different types and purposes of the forms that you’re working with.

You mentioned OnBase, OnBase actually does that.

I always think of things like simply someone submitting an application or a form to a government agency and a value in if they provide a Zip Code that’s outside of our city or county or the state, routing that maybe to somewhere initially right away. That should be weird if someone maybe is applying for a public assistance program or some sort of program and they don’t even live in our county, they don’t even live in our state. Why do we move that somewhere so someone can immediately look at it?

Or knowing, things like having document deficiency checklists. If someone submitted a form and hasn’t provided proof of income or proof of their identity or proof of residence or their family information from the beginning, let’s know that right away so that we can then communicate with that applicant that they haven’t given us everything that they weighted rather than in a paper format that sits in its folder at the bottom until it works its way up to the top, only for a caseworker then to take a look at it and go, oh well this looks like they don’t even live here. Or they should have submitted this to a different county or they make way too much money, there’s no way they qualify.

Guys, I think our listeners will love this discussion. We’d love to have you guys back on again. I think that we could talk about forms a little bit more or have some other topics. And for those of you who are listening to this podcast, if you want more information you can certainly go and check out our blog at blog.nathana12.sg-host.com, that’s blog.nathana12.sg-host.com and thank you everyone for joining us today. And if you haven’t already done so, be sure to subscribe to the Paperless Productivity podcast where we tackle some of the biggest paper-based pain points facing organizations today. We’ll see you next time.

Thanks again for joining us on this podcast and if you haven’t already done so, be sure to subscribe to Paperless Productivity where we tackle some of the biggest paper-based pain points facing organizations today. We’ll see you next time.