Episode 21: Seven Key Digital Solutions for Local Government

Local government officials are some of the most stretched public servants providing access to key services that help their citizens live better lives each day. But with all that stretching doesn’t come without a bit of pain as well, often in the form of understaffed departments trying to do it all with antiquated paper systems.

Today our guest is Paul Gorman, account executive at ImageSoft in the government space. Paul will be sharing with us seven solutions for local government to create digital access that makes a real impact for the people they serve as well as the hardworking officials themselves. Thanks for joining us today, Paul.

Activity that involves managing data or documents in an environment like that is likely to suffer and you’ll see this at both constituent facing and employee facing information processes. So a good internal example of this would be managing the dissemination and collection of policy and procedure documents. As part of the onboarding process and often even annually, staff have to sign off and acknowledge receipt of procedures and processes and that very act requires maintaining the documents, the dates of dissemination, follow up on the stragglers and the ability to find this documentation later is really what you’re shooting for.

Every change to a policy frankly should probably be documented this way and frequently they aren’t. Too often the changes in requirements to distribute and share happen without the backend infrastructure, so it’s never really a problem until it’s needed and then it winds up being as you know, probably a big problem

Right, and-

The software solution does the hard work. It basically leverages the module by providing easier policy and procedure dissemination. You can even do harassment training, sensitivity training, management, communication. All of this could be routed through this module. The policy changes can go to an approval process before being disseminated to staff. Access rights determine who gets which policies. So essentially HR and IT policies, they may go to everyone, while changes to program policies would probably only go to effected staff.

So tracking the stragglers with it is automated. They have reminders that go out. They have comprehensive reporting. Essentially what it does is it completely solves the data and information problem. The cool thing about this is that it can be an enterprise solution because if you think about it, everybody in the organization pretty much needs that sense to it and even if you don’t have enterprise wide seat licenses for an OnBase solution, you could have this product as an enterprise solution.

And I like to look at it this way. If you’re an IT staff looking for a quick one, this is a great choice. It’s a real quick win and you solve a problem absolutely completely with it. That’s an internal one. A great external one may be processing permits. Processing a permit is a pain for government staff, but it’s also essentially a pain for constituents. Anytime you improve a constituent facing process, it’s supposed to be a priority of government.

So where I see this so often is in growing communities. Permit processing times can really become hot topics for political leadership because in a growing community you’re adding housing, you’re adding buildings, you’re adding roadways and that creates the permit bloat and that permit load has to move as quickly as possible to keep up with the growth of the organizations.

So Hyland Software has an electronic plan review process. Usually permit processes are expensive. I call them budget busters. This process, this solution is really not that way. What they’ve done is they’ve essentially targeted the very parts of the permit process that caused governments the most pain and it caused the largest delays. And what it does is it allows you to work with your existing permitting system investments, allowing you to increase the velocity of the process without having to go through an expensive, oftentimes multi-year replacement up at an entire permitting system.

I like to see it as well as a way in which you can gradually move off of the legacy data driven permit solution. You can implement something like this and slowly add OnBase components while you move off of the old system. I like it as well because it does double duty. In addition to permit processing, the same software module can be used by the asset management teams looking to mark up and manage their as built drawings. It helps them with managing complex work order processes. So you get a single module in there and solve two problems with a single solution cost. It can help you create an accessible digital library of asset infrastructure and can literally save lives and property by saving critical time during emergencies.

I think that a lot of people, they don’t understand that. They kind of expect these cities to spring up out of nowhere and they don’t. There is a process for that in order for it to happen correctly and to be able to serve them longterm. So I think that’s something that probably does cause a lot of frustration and if there’s more, a quicker access through this digital process, that’s something that’s probably going to demonstrate itself externally as well.

But talking about, you just touched on right now the first responder aspect of it, what about some of those things like that? Because, like you said, saving it… This goes beyond just just simple access and making things convenient for people in a city. What about things like that where it’s truly critical for their safety?

You have to go look for it, and frequently, let’s take a broken water main as a great example. In the case of a broken water main, you may have water racing down the street creating an essential… It’s like a flash flood when it actually happens. That flash flood is going on and people are getting trapped in their vehicles. The first responders are out there trying to get people off their vehicles and what’s your role? Should be in that instance is going directly to where the turnoff valves are and shutting down that stream of water.

The issue is all the infrastructure is underground. It’s not like you can look at it say, “Oh there it is.” You have to know where it is and you have to get the proper equipment out there to dig, identify it, turn it off. And that process of finding that piece of infrastructure is assisted tremendously if you have digitized all of your as build drawings, the drawings to tell you how this thing was actually built.

Frequently when things go in the ground, they’re not quite exactly the way the engineered grew them up because the people installing them are running into things that the engineer couldn’t envision. And getting those drawings digitize for them and available to the first responders or in this case to the maintenance staff is critical in certain situations, and actually literally save lives and property.

The mobile solutions like that, enabling field staff to get at documents, it’s one of the ways in which you increase the velocity of services because if have to… It’s very inconvenient to carry around a file cabinet like in your truck. You can’t do it. So when you’re in the field, having access to that file cabinet as a digital download is one of the ways in which you solve the drive time. You don’t have to drive back and forth. Nobody has to go and do an archive of paper documents and try to find something. Your access to this stuff is instantaneous and the service to the constituents improves dramatically.

I look at it this way, it really use providing a service basically not just to the constituent but to the agency itself. The sooner you know about a broken piece of infrastructure and can address it, it’s just smart management except it helps you identify the issues and address them more quickly. Those of us in public works not being omniscient, we need the public basically becomes our eyes and ears as an identifier of the broken infrastructure.

One of the ways to sell this type of solution that I liked is that you can incorporate the political management into the response letter, either the mayor or the city manager, and when the solution is fixed, thank the citizen for the notice of explaining what was done. So the citizen that notifies you, you capture that information. Now I like to say that there is no wrong door for something like this to come in. If they call you, be available. Have a way to take that message and incorporate that message into the routing process.

If they fill out an e-form that you have on your website, the constituent service request e-form, have that route to the same process or even the constituent could take a photograph of the item, of the broken infrastructure and submit that and have that route to the process. What can happen is essentially as that contact comes through the door, it can be routed directly to the right part of the agency to address it, and you could have the city manager or the mayor respond back thanking the citizen for letting them know and telling them what they’ve done to to address it. It can be all form driven and automated. You can kick off the process and the entire thing can look to the citizen like, “I am getting directly contacted back for the interaction that I’ve had with the government.”

The Hyland Software version of a public request solution, it manages the time consuming aspect of searching for content but also the time consuming assets of managing the process by which that content is searched for, gathered, redacted and submitted to the individual who made the request. That provides a more rapid response, would be one way to describe it, in a less time intensive effort to provide that response, and you have some assurance that your record that you’re providing back is relatively complete or as complete as you can make it And that you’ve accurately redacted. You’ve got the redaction stage of the process in place before the record is submitted back to the public. Those are all the painful parts of it and the Hyland solution directly addresses those.

One of the related solutions to that is the public access portal and agencies use that as a strategy to reduce the load of staff responding to Freedom of Information Act or FOIA requests. I like to think of it as an augmentation of the public information request, where rather than spending staff time responding to routing requests, the public is invited to search for specific types of content themselves.

I like to think of it a little like the checkout line at a grocery store. When you’re in the regular checkout lines, you have a store employee actually doing the checkout for you, but many people like to go through the self check line where they scan it and bag it themselves. From the store’s perspective, it’s less expensive for them not to have to consume a human resource asset to check your bags out for you. But from the public access, we view it as at the convenience.

This is sort of like using that same model to apply for public information. It’s quick and easy to set up and extremely affordable for local governments. It provides a quick win for the IT team and places the burden of performing the search and looking for the documents on the customer, but it’s more of a self-help burden as opposed to a true burden.

Thanks again for joining us today for this episode of Paperless Productivity. This podcast is sponsored by ImageSoft, the paperless process people, which you can learn more about@nathana12.sg-host.com. That’s ImageSoft I-N-C.com. Join us next time where you’ll learn how to harness the power of technology, supercharge efficiency, and accomplish your organization’s goals.