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This is the Orange-Ulster BOCES;
the E-doc solution meeting or session.
With us today we have Sheila Almond.
She has been a Records Management Supervisor
for the Orange-Ulster BOCES since 1996.
She oversees a staff of eleven employees
and is the Administrator of the E-doc System, welcome Sheila.
Thank you.
Also with us today is Maryanne Monte.
She is the Grants Coordinator for the Orange County BOCES.
We’ll stop and applaud. Please, thank you.
Where she has overseen the development and implementation
of records programs for eleven component school districts.
Maryanne has developed a records management office
that provides multi-levels of support
to school districts and other governments
in the Mid-Hudson Region.
She has been instrumental in the planning
and implementation of E-docs since 2002. Welcome Maryanne.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
First and foremost I'd like to thank
Andy Raymond for inviting us here today
because we have a story to tell
and we are very happy with the story
we have to share with you.
So before I get started
I’d just like to let you know that
we are going to break our presentation
down into three pieces.
The first is the story of
how we got to the E-doc Solution.
The second is a small
skit that we've put together to
keep you awake at the end of the day
and let you appreciate the E-doc Solution.
Then lastly we'll go live
to actually demonstrate E-doc to you.
The reason why I want to tell you our story
is because it goes back to 1989
when our BOCES decided to develop
a records management office
that would meet the needs
not only of our component school districts,
but the BOCES itself.
When we looked at what needed to be done, the needs
assessment that we've about heard so often today,
we realized that we shared a common problem.
We didn't know what kind of paper we had,
how much paper we had,
where it was, who was using it or whatever.
So the first order of business
as part of our consortium was to conduct an inventory
across the school districts of Orange County
and within our BOCES.
You can imagine we found that
we had more paper than we ever believed possible.
The second year of our consortium we decided
OK the next step is let's get into
the inactive storage areas of the BOCES and
the school districts and through that exercise
we threw out eight tons of paper in one year.
That was the amount of inactive, obsolete records
that were stored in the inactive storage areas.
The next year we said “well where do we go from here?”
And of course at that time,
those of you who've been around as long as I have
you'll remember that in the mid-1990s
the push was on for microfilming.
So we embarked on a comprehensive microfilming effort
and from about 1994 to date,
we have microfilmed in excess of
2,000 cubic feet of records.
If you wonder how much that is
I was looking around this room earlier today
and I realized that we can fill
from wall to wall from floor to ceiling
this room over seven times with cubic foot cartons.
So that you can get an appreciation of
the volume that we've microfilmed.
Then we dipped our toe in the water of
electronic document management for the first time
in the late 1990s, when we purchased the
ICIS software system to help our BOCES
and the school districts manage their board minutes.
It went over pretty well but we realize that
there was more application than just board minutes.
So we proceeded for a while
as I say to Sheila all the time
we believe in taking baby steps because
if we plunge into something too quickly we won’t succeed.
As it happened, I was attending a
meeting of the technology directors
for the schools in Orange County.
I just want to take a step back
I keep saying schools because
that's the BOCES mentality.
But to Sheila’s credit over the years,
our records office as was indicated in our introduction
does work throughout the Mid-Hudson Region.
Our clients include school districts,
municipalities, village clerk’s offices,
district clerks, firehouses, and police offices.
So we are not restricted to schools,
we are a service for the entire Hudson Valley.
That service is based on the idea that
if we are the expertise, we will save you
the problem of having to be the experts.
We’ll support your goals and
you won’t have to utilize your staff
or resources to get the job done.
In any event getting back to the meeting
it was early 2000,
I attended a meeting of
the IT directors of Orange County and
I heard one IT director lament the fact
that at that point his district
had spent in excess of $80,000
on an electronic document management system
and still couldn't get it right.
So I went back to Sheila and I said
“this kind of fits our profile.
Our mission is to come up with solutions
for our clients and our BOCES.
A solution that makes them an end user
and not necessarily the brain power,
behind what has to get done.”
So Sheila and I embarked on the venture
of trying to identify an appropriate
electronic document management system.
You've heard about it, filled your head today about
all the processes you go through
but I’d like to explain what we did
and why we did it.
I just gave you a history of what we did
within the school districts and it is apparent
that the majority of our effort
was geared towards microfilming.
So we had this monster of microfilm out there,
that was in it’s format.
Those of you deal with microfilm
you know that it is antiquated.
It is difficult to work with no matter
what kind of locator systems you have.
It is a matter of finding the roll,
getting it on the reader-printer and scrolling through
to find what you are looking for, it is cumbersome.
The alternative to that
is the paper that is still sitting down in
some damp basement that nobody wants to go into.
So the invariable answer is
we don't have the record
because nobody wants to go look for it.
So we wanted to factor into whatever we did
all the work that we had done before.
Then of course look forward
to what we would encounter in the future.
We still had the obligation to deal with
finding a permanent solution for
our records of permanent value.
We knew we were going to keep microfilming to some extent,
because digital media would not do it all.
We also knew that we didn't have
the technical expertise to identify a system
that can not only work for us
but talk to everything else that is out there.
The student management systems,
the financial management systems,
our ICIS System which we had invested
so much money and effort into.
So we wanted to pull in the IT people
to help guide us as to what was
the appropriate approach to take.
But then we also wanted to make sure that
our ultimate end users would have a say in the matter.
So we put together a little ad hoc committee
of the village clerks, town clerks,
records management offices in the school district,
and people from our own BOCES.
We discussed at length what they were looking for
and what they thought would be helpful to them.
When all is said and done we came up with DocuWare
which is a software that comes out of Germany and is
peddled in the United States through Alos Corporation.
We tested it for a long time before we
launched. I have to say without hesitation
that it was a nightmare.
My comment earlier in the day
about the notion that you could do it yourself,
I think is a naive notion.
You really need support behind you.
It is not a collateral job or an add on job.
It is a full time job
and Sheila can speak to that better than I
because she has become the administrator of our DocuWare System
and it is a full time job for her.
As is the fact that we have an IT person
who is on staff to the Records Management Office now
just to help troubleshoot, upgrade, add on modules
and whatever we need to do.
In our mind the nightmare was the resistance
and you heard a lot about that earlier today.
Within our own organization
I can remember an evening I had to do a board presentation
and Sheila and I went out to dinner
with our assistant superintendent.
We had an hour between finishing dinner
and the board meeting and I remember to this day
sitting in her office arguing with her
that if BOCES could go paperless purchase orders,
why can't we go paperless documents in general?
The resistance was unbelievable.
Well we finally broke through. It took two years.
Two years to break through
and I can say now that we've broken through
the floodgates have unbelievably opened.
Not only do we at our own BOCES
and the question is often asked
“Well gee if I have to hire somebody
how am I going to justify hiring somebody
to help me do this?”
Well Sheila and I did a business plan and presented it
and we showed what we estimated to be the cost savings
if we went into an electronic document management system.
Our business plan projected out quite right.
In our first year of using
an electronic document management system
our BOCES saved $105,000 which is a lot of little
part-time clerks running around in my mind.
Also in our school districts who are now using it
the savings there is just mounting.
People cannot get over how much they are saving,
the ease of use and what have you.
So just to tie it all together
we wanted to develop a system that sought our mission.
That we would be the brains behind it
not that have the sole power over everything
but we wanted to relieve our clients
from having to worry about the day-to-day
understanding the system, populating the system,
scanning the information, indexing the information and on and on.
We wanted to eliminate the cost of the actual purchase.
I was always drawn back to
that IT director saying that his district spent $80,000
and had nothing to show for it.
So we wanted to relieve any of our clients
of the burden of having to make
that kind of investment.
Then of course we wanted
to tie in all of our old accomplishments,
so they would be part of our new solution.
So in addition to digitizing and managing records
through E-doc, which we will
show you in our live demonstration,
we also incorporated into our in E-doc solution
our ability to take all the existing microfilm
and digitize it so that school districts,
town clerks, village clerks whoever we are dealing with
would no longer have to get out the old reader printer
that probably now they can’t replace
or get parts for.
Also the ease of access and going forward
that we would be able to not only digitize
but microfilm records as necessary.
So we not only incorporated into our E-doc solution
the conversion of microfilm to digital
but our ability as we go forward
to microfilm and digitize concurrently,
which is an unbelievable cost savings to our clients.
Having said all that at this point
we have forty school districts,
I don't know the number of village and clerk’s offices.
Plus three BOCES that are using our shared service
which you heard about through
Monmouth County this morning.
We are a web based service with a very simple
annual fee for being on the web.
It is password protected, sits on it’s own server,
is backed up nightly by our IT people
and allows any time anywhere access.
I can just tell you one application that is,
really in terms of health and safety,
our Risk Management Office took all of it’s
building files and put them on our E-doc System.
In the past when risk management received a call
Saturday night that some bus garage had flooded
they would have to go into the office
retrieve the file and then go off to the building
that had the situation.
Now they merely go on E-doc, pull up the file
and go straight to where needed.
So it saves them innumerable time.
In terms of space, and I love to quote this and
I'm sure everybody in the room has file cabinets; lots of them.
The Library of London, do you have any idea
the cost of maintaining the life of your file cabinet?
I’m not talking a lateral
I’m talking about a straight four drawer file cabinet.
Anybody have any idea of the cost of that?
Nobody wants to guess?
$23,000 that includes the purchase of the cabinet itself,
where it sits and going in and out
of that cabinet throughout it’s lifetime
to pull out materials and put them back in.
So every time you look at a file cabinet
in your office from now on you could think
there's a potential $23,000 saving
which could help you whether you are
interested in buying your own system
or participating in a shared service
help you justify going forward.
So any questions on how we got to the
E-doc solution and why we got there? OK yes.
(Inaudible)
Actually we could not find something
as simple, as expandable, and as versatile as e-doc.
Plus e-doc’s capacity to be compatible with
everything that was already out there.
That was really our key,
whether it be student management systems or
a village clerk’s database or whatever was out there.
Plus looking towards the future
through e-doc you could manage
e-mails so it will save people from going out
and buying software to manage e-mails.
If we ever get to the point
where we have to manage voicemail
e-doc has the capacity to manage voicemail as well.
The current situation and
the world of our clients, plus the future,
we wanted to be sure that we could do it.
In terms of the proprietariness of the system
when you buy into e-doc they don't own your data.
You own it. So if e-doc decided to go away
ten years from now we would still own
all the data that's there.
It doesn't go with the company. Yes.
(Inaudible)
That's a module and that is another point to be made.
You've heard from many of our speakers today that
you could add different modules or enhancements
onto an electronic document management system.
When we first started out we were the client where
information was accessed at your desktop,
just you alone.
Then we added on the module for Internet access.
As I explained earlier we started out small
just within our BOCES and we started opening
it up as a shared service.
When we did that
it made sense to make it Internet accessible. Yes.
(Inaudible)
No, you are just the user in our case.
We handle it all and
again Sheila can speak to this better than I.
The reason why I'm so emphatic is
it is something that you really can't,
not that you can’t do it on your own
but it is labor intensive and
it would be unfair for us
as having implemented a system
to have to say you could
just with your existing staff do it.
Maybe you can. I don't know.
But given the size of our operation we knew we couldn't.
When you start getting into the scanning,
scanning sounds very simple
but of course you have to
set the scanning parameters
to make sure you scan properly.
Once you scan it in
you have to index it
and make sure that it is going to speak to the fields
that you want it to speak to.
So it is more than just a scanning process.
What we do is accept records
and we deal only with closed records.
We don't deal with any active of records.
We accept your closed records in either
microfilm format, paper format, or electronic format.
Then it is a per job charge if you will.
So if you have lots of things in electronic format
all you need to do is
e-mail them to Sheila and it is dumped in.
If you have lots of paper
one of two things, if it is paper that
has a six or seven year retention period and you
just want it in a digital format
we're just scanning them in.
If you want to send us your payroll warrants,
which have a fifty-five year retention period,
we are going to microfilm and digitized concurrently
so there will be the microfilm records for
posterity if you will,
plus the electronic record for searching.
e-doc also has built into it a retention scheduler
so it will identify for you and
for us as the system administrator
what you could throw out.
So we are able to notify you that
this particular record series has reached it’s retention period.
Do you want to keep it?
Do you want to get rid of it?
We are the facilitator but it is your record.
We don’t do anything without your say so.
Because as was mentioned earlier
there might be legal implications as to
why you might want to keep a record.
So we are very user friendly. That's all I can say.
Any other questions? OK
How many of you are familiar with the
commercial "I'm a MAC, I’m a PC"?
Well guess what I'm e-doc and Sheila
is the old records office.
What are you doing?
I got a call from a parent,
the Superintendent wants to know the policy on smoking
because they caught Johnnie Jones again outside smoking.
We need the policy on smoking.
So what are you looking in there for?
I’m looking for the policy on smoking.
But if you go on e-doc all you have to do is go to the policy cabinet.
This is the way I have always done it.
But that's not the way we are doing it anymore.
(Inaudible) wow, it was last revised in 2002
But how do you know that's the most recent revision?
I will just look in the board minutes.
OK now you have to go look in the board minutes.
Doesn’t that mean that you have to
go down in the basement?
Well I have to find the board minutes.
Just give me a minute.
We don’t have a minute.
The superintendent wants it now.
I know but if I have to look at the board meeting to see
if this policy was recently adopted.
I know he said it was but I have to check.
But if I check on e-doc
I’ll know in a matter of seconds whether it was or not.
(Inaudible) I know it is here somewhere.
Sheila all I need to do
But you see this is how I’ve always done it.
This is the way the job came to me and this is mine.
Sheila you keep your paper
and I'm going on e-doc
and I'll have the answer in ten seconds.
Oh wait OK the last revised, what did the board say?
But the board minutes aren’t signed (inaudible).
Sheila you have another call coming in.
They probably want Johnnie Jones’ file now because
I think that's what they want.
They want his student file at this point.
Don't you have to go
to the Main Street School for that?
Oh yes I’ll call them.
OK.
Johnnie Jones’ file.
OK while you’re calling them
keep looking in the board minutes.
But I’ve already looked.
I already have the policy, the board minutes,
and Johnnie’s file up on e-doc.
Look I can’t do everything.
I’m one person (inaudible) and it is not my job!
If they would pay me a little bit more,
maybe let me work a little overtime, maybe I could (inaudible)
Sheila you have another call.
Could you just take the call?
I'll check it on e-doc, I’m not doing it your way.
All right let me look.
We are getting a new policy, the policy is being faxed.
OK let’s see if it matches the one I have on e-doc
which is the most current.
OK so I’m looking up Johnnie Jones’ student file.
I have his record right here.
I also have to look up payroll
because they need a payroll request for Jones.
OK I can do that right now.
I’ll look that up in a minute,
because I’m still looking for Oh here is his file.
Sheila I have everything up on e-doc.
Why are you doing this?
Because is the way I have always done it.
You need to go to the basement
to get the old personnel files.
Well I can’t.
Well you have to and you can catch your
death of cold down there like you did last year.
But my feet hurt and I don’t have my mask.
OK.
Because the mold content right now is at about 80%.
OK all right.
OK so I’ve got his thing here.
Sheila.
The payroll person.
Sheila.
Wait I’m almost done.
Put an end to your madness.
But I can look through every week.
Let's talk about the five Es of e-doc
and put an end to your madness.
But this is the way I’ve always done it.
Put an end to you madness,
come show us the five Es of e-doc.
OK now we go on to the next phase.
Did you enjoy that?
Like you haven’t heard it before.
I just want to say that
I have a saying about Sheila’s operation.
They do a lot of work in basements.
She has pictures that are unbelievable.
Like crawling through cutouts and rock to get to records
that have been stored there for twenty years.
That was predominantly the records management office
dealing with old musty rooms,(racoon poop [jokingly]) inactive storage areas.
(Live magots [jokingly]) When we introduced e-doc I said that Sheila’s operation
was going from the basement to the boardroom.
So now we are going to the boardroom
to see what life is like with e-doc.
I thought your motto was when in doubt throw it out.
MARYANNE MONTE: That’s true too.