Agenda - 10-24-2006-3 - Laserfiche WebLink

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0 upon intake, as well as sharing their thoughts on process automation to eliminate the need for paper. Based on the analysis to date, it is clear that the scale of magnitude of scanning operations varies greatly between departments. Larger departments, such as DSS and Health, have potentially large scale benefits from scanning, with proportional implementation costs. DSS alone has hundreds of different document types, each of which requires its own indexing approach, with potentially tens of millions of sheets of paper to be scanned. Peer agencies across the state and country, some of which have succeeded with scanning projects, and some which have not, have stressed the importance of properly resourcing any such project. Even in projects where the bulk of the physical scanning is handled by vendors, the need for staff support in establishing new business processes and providing input into the scanning process is critical. Scanning project planning should include not just direct costs, but also should determine staff time required for success and ensure appropriate staffing adjustments can be made. It is our recommendation that the County embark on a pilot scanning project. By measuring staff efficiency and storage demands before and after scanning operations are complete, we can determine best practices, project benefits and well as understand and quantify the significant indirect costs associated with scanning on the scale of our larger departments. This in turn, can help direct us more purposefully toward ambitious scanning projects for larger departments. We believe the best opportunity for a scanning pilot would be Child Support Enforcement. Their files are currently paper based, yet modest in overall size at just over 250,000 pages. These files consist of terminated records with demographic information, court orders, event history, and various documents to verify employment and parentage. The rough magnitude of cost to scan these documents and architect an application to automate data handling going forward would be tens of thousands of dollars. This figure does not count staff time to specify indexing rules, for validation, and to re-architect business processes. It should be noted that there is currently no funding in the current CIP budget specifically programmed to cover costs of a scanning project. However, it should also be noted that any expenditures for Child Support Enforcement can potentially be defrayed by 66% reimbursement from the State. The scanning working group proposes the Child Support Enforcement terminated records project be undertaken as a pilot project. The findings from the pilot can then be used to evaluate similar initiatives for the Clerk to the BOCC, DSS, Health and others. Child Support Enforcement and Information Technologies look forward to collaborating to develop a detailed project plan, with quantified costs (including state reimbursements), aresource plan and a project schedule if the Board of County Commissioners is interested in evaluating a pilot program for scanning.