One organization that is currently grappling with the email management issues is my home county – Travis County, Texas.  Two of the county’s public servants – Steve Broberg, Director of the County’s Records Management and Communications Resource Department, and Shawn Malone, the Records Services Supervisor for that Department are actively seeking external input as they approach their decisions on how to manage the ongoing deluge of record and non-record information that appears in the County’s email system. 

As those of you who are so inclined to review their situation, their white paper and direction at this site , you can feel free to provide some of your input.  Remember, as a County government, Steve and Shawn work in an environment that differs substantially from that found in the private sector.  They must find a solution that works for elected officials, whose mandate is often at the level of the state constitution, for a number of disparate and independent departments, while serving the needs of : transparency, public access and accountability for taxpayer provided funding. 

I find the approach to seeking additional input to be refreshing, and some of you who see the video and who read through the documentation may recognize some of the challenges that you face as well.

• Document current business processes
• Identify weaknesses, gaps and areas requiring improvement, and subsequently
• Launch new processes based on newly developed system applications

Where’s the weakness? The weakness rests in the thought that a single iteration of a new or “to be” process is sufficient.  Thus, rather than acquiring advanced Business Process Management (BPM) suites…and then building applications around those tools, agencies tend to rely on contractors who build one-time, one-off solutions that embed some process management capabilities, but that do not allow agencies to:

• Model and simulate alternative processes
• Actively Manage existing processes to shorten process cycle times and to appropriately monitor process goals and business activities
• Apply advanced process analytics to see where bottlenecks are developing, and then to apply additional modeling and simulation to eliminate such bottlenecks.

There are outstanding suites available for use, some of which would allow government organizations to operate with as much or with greater efficiency than any private sector firm.  However, until these agencies demand that contractors incorporate such suites into their proposed solutions, it is unlikely that we will see government agencies achieve the results that the desire.  Contractors, for their part are apt to build solutions that “encourage” or require agencies to continue to return to them for future services, as business requirements or statutory requirements create the need for additional changes in process.

One agency that has broken the constraints of that particular mold is the Los Angeles County Information Systems Advisory Body.  As that group sought to build a solution to automate a key law enforcement application for the collection of DNA evidence, they sought to acquire a solution that they could implement, and that they could operate over time.   As a result of their work, the Los Angeles County Information Systems Advisory Body and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department now work with a solution that will serve them well beyond an initial deployment.

• Increased visibility into their outsource partner’s processes
• Improved ability to monitor contract compliance with service levels
• Ability to locate information that is currently in an outsource partner’s hands – often at the folder level
• Ability to provide reporting to senior management on the status of one or more conversion projects
• Improved communications and issue reporting with the organization’s conversion partner

In improving visibility of an outsource partner’s processes, the use of BPM tools allows an organization to better understand and to see real-time information regarding the progress of either an ongoing scanning effort or a large back-file conversion effort.  They can actually look at the current status of those efforts over a secure web link.

Turnaround times can be readily calculated and reported to an organization on an automatic basis.  Organizations whose partners make use of BPM tools can see immediately whether their outsource firm is either in compliance with service level agreements, or whether they may be out of compliance.

BPM tools often make use of the data collected through the preparation, scanning, indexing, and quality assurance processes to provide customized reports that limit a project managers work in reporting to senior management on the progress of conversion efforts.  The use of graphical representations of information (e.g. bar charts or graphs) can supplement the data provided in those reports to provide an accurate picture of the status of the conversion efforts.

Communications with outsource conversion partners has been handled by telephone and email in the past.  The use of BPM tools and the collaboration components within them can significantly improve issue reporting, tracking and resolution.  That collaboration component also helps ensure that no issue drops through the cracks, and that all open issues are visible to both parties.

Could such capabilities be applied to large-scale in-house scanning and conversion efforts?  The answer is yes, so long as there is adequate data available from the capture software in use.