The Perfect Storm

The recession has created a perfect storm of anxiety for state and local governments. Demands for public services have soared. In North Carolina, for instance, the number of people needing food assistance swelled by 231,000 between December 2007 and April 2009.

This summer, a north Texas TV station reported that applicants were lining up at 5 a.m. outside a Dallas food stamp office, and some people had waited months to receive their benefits. Members of the New York State Association of Counties complained that demand for unemployment insurance, food stamps and public health care was rising, while sales tax revenues had dropped by nearly 10 percent.

In this tough economy, governments cannot simply add more employees to satisfy burgeoning demand for services. In fact, many governments are seeing their staffs shrink. As the work force ages, governments are losing experienced employees to retirement. But tight budgets and hiring freezes make it impossible to replace those employees, let alone add more workers. Even as the economy starts to grow stronger, governments will take years to recover from the current era of revenue shortfalls and budget constraints.

When you need to get more done, but your resources are tight, the best plan is to become more efficient. Effective technology, implemented wisely, can help a government do business in a new way, re-engineering processes, automating tasks and eliminating waste. These changes help save money while meeting the demand for more services.

An enterprise content management (ECM) solution such as OnBase® from Hyland Software provides an ideal vehicle for sailing through the economic storm that governments face today. By cutting out paper, automating labor-intensive processes, streamlining workflow and reducing the need for storage space, ECM reduces costs and eliminates busywork. That means governments can reassign employees from less productive tasks to jobs that provide greater value.

Hyland Software has been delivering ECM to state and local governments since 1991, so its experts know how to tailor an OnBase solution to a government's unique needs. And providing that solution doesn't require a year or more of expensive custom programming. OnBase is an off-the-shelf package, entirely point-and-click configurable, so OnBase applications get up and running fast.

The whole implementation cycle, from needs assessment through configuration, testing and deployment, takes as little as a couple of weeks and no more than a few months. A government can make the investment and start enjoying the returns in the same budget cycle, making an OnBase deployment a budget-neutral decision.

With an ECM system such as OnBase, you can transform your perfect storm of economic distress into a perfect opportunity to better serve the public.

Arlington County, Va.
Workload Surges, Payroll Holds Firm

When officials in Arlington County, Va., decided to standardize their content management technology enterprise-wide, they investigated all the leading solutions on the market. They put OnBase at the top of their list.

"Some of the unique features of the software, particularly its ability to integrate with line-of-business applications, were key factors in selecting OnBase," said Paul Carter, the county's enterprise records program manager.

Arlington County launched its ECM implementation in 2004 with two pilot applications. Since then, it has used OnBase for more than 50 applications for 10 of its 16 agencies. The system currently manages about 1.8 million documents - 15 million pages - and it will capture nearly 20,000 documents daily in the near future.

One application that has yielded significant process improvement manages taxpayers' real estate assessment appeals. "Once they file an appeal, that automatically kicks off a workflow that moves things to the proper appraisers for further assessment and review," Carter said. "That has cut the review time down by as much as 50 percent in any given year, and has allowed us to handle an increased volume of appeals."

Also thanks to OnBase, the Land Records Division