Georgia County Uses Document Management To Streamline Constituent Service: Digitizes 200 Years Worth Of Business Documents

By Joan Honig, product marketing manager, Westbrook Technologies, Inc.

Paperwork is the indispensable currency of all public sector agencies—the myriad forms and documents required to respond to, and satisfy, constituent inquires, complaints, filing requirements, and claims. As anyone on the other end of the process will tell you (i.e., the person waiting on the phone for information), ready access to the pertinent form or document also plays a central role in the perceived quality of constituent service; information must be easily accessible in order to provide efficient responses, processing, or even complaint resolution.

In order to assure information availability, public agencies must have, at a minimum, a disaster recovery plan in place. However, developing a disaster recovery plan can itself have disastrous consequences if not implemented properly—particularly in cases where the solution needs to be implemented across several agencies, where each has different processes and workflows.

Floyd County, Georgia faced such a challenge. The county required a solution to safeguard current documents as well as its archive of historical paper documents that date back to the turn of the century. The implementation of their disaster recovery program began with converting large volumes of paper to digital documents. However, early on, they realized that this wasn't simply a project based on scanning and archiving documents. They also needed to design workflows tailored to the way each agency within the county retrieves and uses their documents, while providing for centralized access across multiple government agencies.