Canadian Government Executive - Volume 21

Act and Local Government Act mandates.

“We went through a pre-qualification pro-

cess and then a closed RFP invite process,”

Knowles said. “Rio proved the best fit for

our needs.”

Map and Classify

Choosing Laserfiche was the easy part. Be-

fore installing it, the team created a system

to migrate a million or more records from

its old electronic document management

and classification system. First, it used a

spreadsheet to map out the project and

figure out where things existed in Lotus

Notes. Next, it had to decide where it was

going to reside on the new system and how

to get it there.

Then it was time for cleanup and docu-

ment destruction before moving on to

setting-up servers and actually building

migration scripts. Because there wasn’t

any document naming when the District

of Mission used Lotus Notes and because

not all employees understood the district’s

records retention schedules, the organiza-

tion needed to carefully control the ways

in which employees filed records into the

new system.

Officers of Primary Responsibility (OPRs)

/ Canadian Government Executive

// November 2015

Innovation

Part of the problem was that Lotus

Notes, the software that had made pos-

sible the great leap forward in 1993, al-

lowed everyone in the organization to file

anywhere and everywhere. There was no

consistency in document naming or index-

ing. “It was turning into a bit of a free for

all,” Knowles observed.

The IT department, which manages the

documents of nearly all of the municipal-

ity’s departments, sought a solution that

was fully compliant with the most de-

manding document security standards

and that had a track record. Ideally, the

systemwould live up to British Columbia’s

Local Government Management Associa-

tion (LGMA) standards.

After a closed RFP process, the District of

Mission turned to Ricoh Canada, a reseller

of Laserfiche ECM. Ricoh recommended

the software designers Rio Product, as its

flexible licensing structure allows the gov-

ernment to expand, or shrink, its use with-

out having to negotiate a new contract.

Their ECM system was compliant with

HIPAA and supported LGMA standards,

while its robust search engine and index-

ing abilities promised to significantly ease

compliance with Freedom of Information

lmost a quarter century ago,

when most municipalities were

rummaging through file cabi-

nets and sifting through folders

for specific documents, and the internet

was still in the future (to say nothing of

“cloud computing”), the District of Mis-

sion in British Columbia became an early

adopter of an electronic document man-

agement system to organize its documents

and files.

Today, while many municipalities are

still searching for documents stored in

dozens of file cabinets, the District of Mis-

sion has done away with its electronic

system and replaced it with an enterprise

content management system (ECM) that

has helped it to organize and make search-

able more than a million documents.

Out with Lotus Notes, in

with Laserfiche

The old system was scanning-intensive,

and demanded a time-and-effort commit-

ment to attach files. There was much du-

plication, a slew of issues with file formats,

and it became challenging to search for

anything. Worse, the organization’s Free-

dom of Information (FOI) processes were

at risk of not meeting legal obligations.

“We were one of the first municipalities

doing electronic document management

back then,” said District of Mission IT

Manager Chris Knowles. “But we were just

using our own naming conventions and

own organizational structure.”

Managing a Systems

Transformation:

Going Paperless

Tim

Wacker