Tech Partners Beat a Path To Success

Document-imaging and management technology is still going strong, paradoxically fueled by budget crunches. Indeed, governments are eliminating the need to retain paper originals as a result of the technology.

"Our business has doubled in the past two-and-a-half years," says John Weir, spokesman for software vendor LaserFiche, a winner of VARBusiness' Five-Star Partner Program award (see VARBusiness' March 15 issue). The company got its start in municipal government and holds an estimated 60 percent share of that market, according to Weir. "The economic advantages of eliminating paper are compelling," he says. "We've been especially successful in smaller towns where staffing and storage space have always been tight. During the past two years, the middle of the [municipal] market has come under increasing pressure to cut personnel costs."

The city of Denton, Texas, is a good example of how versatile document-imaging technology is. Reseller VP Imaging has worked with Denton's workforce for more than three years, deploying LaserFiche's solutions in such divisions as human resources, engineering, utilities, building permits, the courts, police and fire departments, and facilities management. "In cities that are growing, it's less expensive to buy software than to add personnel. Even in cities that are losing [their] tax bases, things are starting to loosen up for Q2 of this year," says VP Imaging co-owner Cody Bettis. Despite budget cuts that have postponed some municipal projects, "We've seen a nice increase in business during the past two years," he adds.

Document-imaging management is teaming up with another established municipal technology: geographic information systems, an especially productive union for public-works departments.

For instance, the city of New Hartford, N.Y., hired systems integrator Systems Development Group (SDG), Utica, N.Y., to improve management of its sewer system. SDG created a sleek solution based on Redlands, Calif.-based GIS and mapping software firm ESRI's family of GIS software and SDG's own document-management system, GeoImager AVX. Engineers can quickly and intuitively locate sewer-system elements via the GIS system. A click on any map element, such as a cleanout trap, opens a folder containing all related documents and displays the most recent document.

"I really appreciate the fast access to up-to-date and comprehensive information when responding to service requests," says Anthony Decuffa, New Hartford's maintenance supervisor. "When reviewing a potential problem area or evaluating a site for new construction, having all the pertinent data at your fingertips makes us wonder how we ever manually managed [projects] in the past."

Criminals And Scofflaws Beware
GIS is equally appreciated in public-safety departments. The police department of Lincoln, Neb., (LPD) illustrates how GIS can evolve into a powerful crime-fighting tool. LPD police chief Tom Casady began using ESRI's ArcView maps generated by the city's planning and engineering departments in 1998. By plotting incident reports on these maps, Casady's command team was able to assign patrols more effectively. But the department wanted to do crime mapping more quickly. Casady found the solution in CrimeView, an extension to ArcView developed by The Omega Group.

CrimeView converts all of the tabular crime-report data routinely captured by the department's records-management system and plots it on an ArcView map. Now, at the LPD's monthly crime-analysis meeting, patterns can be found in an avalanche of data--up to 400 incident reports per day. The LPD is able to find deeper patterns, such as geographic correlations between different types of related crimes. The next step is to get crime-mapping tools into the hands of officers on the street. Also, CrimeView Internet enables arresting officers to create their own crime-analysis maps at the precinct level. Information on crimes similar to one that led to an arrest is immediately available to officers during interrogation, often leading to multiple crimes being solved with one arrest.

Recently, the LPD deployed CrimeView Community to give citizens access to real-time crime reports and maps via the Web. The department's Web page hits soared to more than 100,000 per month. The new visitors were among those coming to pay their parking-violation fines. Yes, Lincoln citizens are able to pay their tickets online via credit card for only $1 extra.

Parking enforcement is a leading source of municipal revenue. Of course, technology has come to the rescue. New York City, for example, collected $429 million in parking-ticket revenue during 2002, but lost millions more due to human error. Officials estimate that 1 million parking tickets went unpaid each year.

"For 20 years, this city has been trying to solve the problem that when parking agents make a mistake, we bill the wrong people and a lot of the fines never get collected," Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was quoted as saying in The New York Times. That's about to end, thanks to new ticket-writing tools from Symbol Technologies, Holtsville, N.Y., and systems-integrator partner Duncan Parking Technologies in Harrison, Ark. The NYPD purchased 1,500 Symbol PPT 2800 handheld computers with integrated bar-code scanners and an equal number of wearable MF4T thermal printers. The devices communicate via Symbol's wireless LAN. Now cops "write" tickets by scanning a 2-D bar code on vehicle-registration stickers for error-free parking tickets. Police chief Michael Scagnelli told the New York Post the error rate will drop to less than 1 percent from 13 percent, which could mean an extra $64 million per year in revenue.

Scofflaws have even more to fear from wireless parking-enforcement systems. The city of Vancouver, British Columbia, collected an additional $300,000 in 2003 by checking ticketed vehicles against its repeat-offender database in real-time via a CDPD network. Epic Data, a developer of wireless data collection systems, provided Symbol's 1733 handhelds, TicketManager software installation and training. Vancouver expects to recoup the $800,000 cost of the system in less than three years.

Wi-Fi Everywhere
Citywide Wi-Fi networks are popping up everywhere: Garland, Texas; Medford, Ore.; North Miami Beach, Fla.; San Mateo, Calif.; and Spokane, Wash., are just a few cities that have deployed wireless networks since last fall. Most of them are mesh networks. Mesh networks are similar to the Internet in their ability to intelligently route data around obstacles. In a traditional Wi-Fi network, multiple client devices communicate with each other through a single access point, which can become overburdened with traffic or fail entirely, decreasing throughput. Mesh-network client devices act as routers and transmitters or receivers of data. When mesh clients are in close proximity, they automatically form ad-hoc peer-to-peer networks, reducing traffic loads on access points. The self-forming and self-healing properties of mesh networks provide the high availability and flexibility that police and fire departments need. Garland's network will cover a record-breaking 57 square miles when it is completed in the second quarter of 2004. Lockheed Martin Space Operations Division is installing a mesh network developed by NexGen City, Richardson, Texas. Garland plans car-to-car video, data and eventually voice communications over its new network.

David Hakala ([email protected]), a freelance writer based in Denver, has chronicled IT innovations since 1988.