Durham is in the midst of rolling out an imaging system that will eventually encompass all 26 city departments. When finished, the system is expected to slash labor costs, eliminate most offsite storage of city documents, provide online, interdepartmental document sharing for the first time and enhance decision making at all levels.
While the savings generated by the system are important, the city also expects imaging to help change for the better the way Durham serves its constituents. "Imaging forms a cornerstone for what we are looking to do with our organization in the next few years," said Orville Powell, Durham city manager.
A key goal is to flatten the organizational structure of the city, which will help improve information sharing for workers and service delivery for the public. For this to happen, information needs to move laterally from department to department, Powell said. Imaging provides the mechanism for that to happen, he explained, by taking documents out of file cabinets and putting them on a network of computers so everyone has access to them.
IMAGING PROPOSAL
Durham, a city of 140,000 once known for its tobacco business, has diversified its economy and is now known as the "city of medicine," with 25 percent of its workforce involved in the medical and health industry. The city, which includes Duke University, Duke Medical Center and North Carolina Central University, is located within the famed Research Park Triangle.
As Durham's economy continues to advance, the city is modernizing government operations through automation. In recent years, it has installed a geographic information system and has pilot-tested imaging technology for records management.
In 1992, the City Council issued a resolution stating that the use of innovative technologies should be explored to help meet a mandate for reinventing city government. "They wanted to see whether technology could help the city do more with less, reduce manual labor and slow down tax increases," said Margaret Bowers, Durham city clerk.
The City Council, which anticipated resistance to the project from department heads who might not like the idea of converting their paper files to electronic images for everybody to share, adopted a policy of open government and open records. Unless a file was deemed confidential, it was to be open and available to both employees and the general public. Files were also to be made accessible in an electronic format from any city government location.
COST JUSTIFICATION
Before investing in the imaging system, the city analyzed the likely performance improvements over their paper-based communication lines. Staff determined how many city positions were involved with handling paper documents, then calculated how much time was spent conducting certain tasks.
The results were startling. Of the 107 city positions handling paper documents on a daily basis, almost 30 percent of their time was spent on tasks that could be eliminated by imaging. Imaging could also help eliminate problems such as misfiling and time wasted searching for documents. With a fully networked citywide imaging system, the city estimated it could save between $578,000 and $770,000 annually on paper-handling costs.
MULTI-PHASED APPROACH
Armed with cost-saving estimates from the study, the city was ready to purchase a system. After a competitive bidding process in 1994, the city awarded a contract to Blue Bell, Pa. - based Unisys Corp. for its InfoImage Folder system.
The installation of the system is the first of a multi-phased implementation of imaging throughout the city government. In the first phase, InfoImage Folder was implemented in the departments of city clerk, records management, risk management, finance, fire, internal audit and the city manager. These departments were done first because they have records that are needed the most on a daily basis.
The second phase, set for this spring, will involve converting permanent city records stored in hundreds of file cabinets in city hall and at off-site warehouses. The final phases of the project will bring the most paper-intensive departments into the networked imaging system.
CHANGING THE ORGANIZATION
By going with a phase approach, the city hopes to address two challenges common with implementing imaging technology. First, phasing allows the city to discover and resolve problems that could crop up during the initial installation. By solving these problems at an early stage, the city will likely avoid other challenging issues when the system becomes much larger.
Second, phasing allows Durham to install imaging first where it is most likely to succeed. When skeptical workers see imaging working in the first departments, it has the potential to melt away resistance to using the technology. "We hope to win them over with the results," explained Bowers.
The city also hopes to capitalize on two significant benefits with imaging. Durham plans to give its citizens broad access to government records through imaging and to generate revenue from businesses willing to pay for the privilege of electronically accessing and retrieving public information. These benefits, together with improvements in sharing information, decision making and worker productivity, will help Durham change its operations.
Only by taking a chance and investing in new technology can these benefits and solutions become reality, observed Powell. "We're trying to change processes that have been based on how this organization used to function and communicate in the past," he said. "We're trying to build a different kind of organization today."
The $836,000 UNIX-based client/server system consists of two Unisys U6000/65 servers, four scanning workstations, 28 image-enabled workstations and an optical jukebox, all of which are networked to the city's Ethernet backbone.
InfoImage Folder is an electronic file-folder management system for storing, retrieving, modifying and routing business documents. It manages electronic files, which can be organized into folders that may contain documents consisting of multiple data types - such as images, electronic notes and annotations, sound, video, spreadsheet files and word processing documents.
In addition to InfoImage Folder, phase one also includes the implementation of a subsystem that stores voluminous general ledger reports from the Unisys A11 mainframe on optical disc. The technology, known as computer output to laser disc - or COLD - allows any department to retrieve periodic spending reports from optical storage and eliminates enormous paper files.
