Eugene cuts through silos

The City of Eugene Ore., wanted to eliminate silos of information and improve communication among departments, so it adopted a new enterprise content management (ECM) framework, which includes technology from Laserfiche. The new IT strategy has streamlined and standardized processes across departments, as well as added new features such as a geographical information system (GIS), SharePoint integration and asset protection, according to a recent news release from Laserfiche.

Loring G. Hummel, department application team manager for Eugene, says that the new system has given the city better control of its information assets. “A big benefit,” he explains, “is that the whole system is auditable. Because authorization is now controlled by a central administrator, in respect to security roles, we’re able to lock down repositories and folders according to different administrative needs. Our ECM solution is one of our larger information systems that encompasses risk management and compliance like our ERP and database servers do.”

Hummel adds, “Both the placement of servers on our network and the positioning of our repositories to simplify the creation of shared processes give us the technical framework that allows departments to create business processes to cut through silos. That’s a good start.”

An example of one of the new business processes is citywide contract management. “Every department keeps its own copies of contracts and its own retention policies, even though everything’s in the city recorder’s archives,” Hummel explains. “They may not know what’s being kept centrally and if they do, they think it’s a big process to access them. One of the things that attracted us to Rio [Laserfiche's ECM product suite] was the idea of transparent records management, so we could make the actual storage transparent and be able to assign access to certain folders according to who needs to get them. That way, we can really increase the transparency of information back to the organization, which will translate into efficiency.”