State Government Agency

A large state agency is responsible for protecting water and air quality and the proper disposal of hazardous and solid wastes. It enforces environmental laws and provides services and regulations to keep the state's water safe for uses such as drinking water, fish habitat, recreation, and irrigation.

The agency faced an environmental challenge of its own. It performs its duties through its headquarters and another eight regional offices, where agency employees generate huge numbers of paper documents. These include permits, policies used for implementing water quality standards, reports generated for state lawmakers, internal procedural guidelines, and more. After many years of storing boxes and file cabinets loaded with paper documents, the agency reached a critical juncture. The overload of paper documents was not only hampering operations, it had become an issue of physical safety.

"The massive amount of paper generated by one of our most important programs was literally overloading the weight-bearing capacity of the third-floor offices in one of the regional buildings where the documents were stored," says the manager of the agency’s operations and information services division.

The mountains of paper documents created other serious problems. Because documents for various programs typically were stored at one specific building, it was time-consuming for employees to locate and retrieve them, particularly if they worked at another location. Centralized offsite document storage was one option, but it was ruled it out because employees would still need to travel to another location to retrieve documents.

The agency decided to work with the Marquam Group, an IT solutions company based in Portland, Oregon. Marquam recommended deployment of an enterprise content management (ECM) solution using software products from KnowledgeLake that are integrated with Microsoft SharePoint technologies. "We compared the results of our RFP and decided that a solution based on SharePoint and the KnowledgeLake products best met our objectives," says the agency operations manager.

Marquam helped the agency deploy a solution using a number of products, including:

The ECM solution runs on Microsoft SharePoint technologies, Windows Server 2008, and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 data management software. The agency uses networked multi-function devices to scan paper documents. During scanning, key document information is generated as meta data. This information is used by employees to locate and retrieve documents on the agency’s intranet, where they can pull up documents as Adobe Acrobat PDF files.

The solution has allowed the state agency to reduce or eliminate the serious and growing business problems posed by huge volumes of paper. With the KnowledgeLake products, agency employees have quick, easy access to important documents. The solution enabled the agency to digitize large volumes of paper documents and then move the paper out of its offices to an offsite location for long-term, archival storage. The solution was cost-effective, and was also easy to integrate into the agency's existing software, including its Microsoft Office business applications.

Quick, Easy Access to Documents

The KnowledgeLake ECM solution gives agency employees quick, easy access to documents such as permits, regardless of which agency office generated them.

"We issue very complex wastewater discharge permits to municipal wastewater treatment plants and to major industrial facilities that discharge into waters of the state. In the past, we had permits with inconsistencies in them," says the operations manager. "Now, with the new document management solution, we can build a level of consistency in our permit process because it is so much easier for employees to access various permits to validate that they are consistent."

Reduced Paper Burden

The agency is reducing its paper burden with the KnowledgeLake solution—including removal of tons of paper that threatened the physical structure of a regional office.

"The KnowledgeLake software is allowing us to move paper documents that were overloading a regional third-floor office to an offsite storage facility after they have been scanned into the ECM solution," says the operations manager. "The KnowledgeLake ECM solution makes it easy to electronically store and access vital documents. We were able to move all of our paper to an off-site facility, reducing expensive storage. Plus, is it now much easier to comply with our document retention guidelines, which set a retention period of 100 years for documents related to sewage disposal systems that are associated with specific land parcels."

Affordable—and Easily Integrated

The agency also benefits from two important aspects of the KnowledgeLake solution—it is cost effective, and it integrates easily into Microsoft Office.

"The KnowledgeLake products integrate tightly with SharePoint, which in turn integrates into Microsoft Office. That made it easy for our employees to come up to speed on how to use the new system," says the operations manager. He adds that the solution was also affordable, an important benefit during times of tight budgets. "The cost of acquiring and maintaining a good document management solution was a critical part of our RFP. The KnowledgeLake solution was selected because it fit our budget and our business needs."