Embracing Digitization and Using ECRM Tools
Admin
The City of Austin is known – in records management circles, at least – to have a forward-thinking approach to managing government records. But even they have had digitization challenges that many can identify with. Legacy systems and hardware no longer working, OCR errors and institutional knowledge lost due to personnel changes.
Austin implemented Joint Application Development (JAD) sessions to solve these recent challenges. The presentation describes these as “highly structured, facilitated workshops that bring together customer decision makers and IT staff to produce high-quality deliverables quickly. It consolidates months of meetings and phone calls into a structured workshop.”
Using several city business areas to illustrate some of the work they’ve done to overhaul their document management system, presenters Dorothy Garretson, Adriana Vazquez, and Alexander Webb from the City of Austin and Chris Legnon, IQBG, Inc. show before and after examples of data entry automation, improvements in image quality, using business rules to control metadata, and even some ability to recognize handwriting (precisely pencil marks in boxes on a form).
Some lessons learned include the importance of involving subject matter experts for their feedback and buy-in. This involvement facilitates a better understanding of what is needed from the document management system and how the final result can deliver solutions that genuinely improve and make processes more efficient.
Download the PDF of this presentation to view all the business cases that saw improvements from JAD sessions at the City of Austin.
