Taming The Beast: The Oklahoma Department of Agriculture Tackles Document Management

For the state of Oklahoma's Department of Agriculture employees, dealing with a massive paper jungle was starting to resemble a 1950s grade-D horror flick. In fact, you could call it, "Don't Go in the Basement."

The basement, after all, was where literally hundreds of thousands of dated documents were packed in countless cardboard boxes and filing cabinets. If a court case involved, say, a chemical spill that got into the groundwater and even damaged some crops, lawyers representing all involved parties would need to see the relevant records. And those records eventually ended up in the department's basement at the state capital of Oklahoma City. Inevitably, employees had to go down to that basement and sift through box after box, file cabinet after file cabinet. Sometimes, a task for one case would take days. Or more than a week. Even then, the search could still prove fruitless.

By March 2004, Agriculture Department officials decided enough was enough. They sought to convert this Everest-sized mountain of paper documents into an easily accessible and manageable digital format. It teamed up with Oklahoma City-based Business Imaging Systems (BIS), a local reseller/solution provider with a strong track record in document and content management.

"We were wasting a lot of money and time with the old system," says Kenny Naylor, an Oklahoma Agriculture Department program administrator who helped oversee the project. "We were spending all of our time filing the stuff, then trying to find what had been lost. We needed one company to put it all in one place."

Skeptics may ask how much data does a government agency dealing with cows and corn need, anyway? And that's where the skeptics would be wrong. The Ag Department oversees a wide swath of industry that serves as the soul of the state's commerce: Meat inspections and pricing; seed quality; fertilizer storage and distribution; and countless other needed industry regulatory tasks. "Take fertilizer," Naylor says. "We are completely responsible for these products. We need to register and label them. If they say it has 10 percent of a certain chemical in there, we have to find out if it contains exactly that. And if these products end up in some kind of spill, we need to know what kind of environmental impact they could have."

It helps immensely that the reseller speaks the same language as the government-agency customer--whether dealing with the in-house agency tech staff or inspectors in the field.

"You can't live here in Oklahoma and not know about what these people do," says Tony Lugafet, vice president and manager of business development at BIS. "The feed co-ops, the pesticide companies, the ranching operations and the farming businesses--they're all our customers, too. We know how critical it is to access fertilizer content data, and that the data is accessible, shareable and accurate. Now, they can retrieve this data in a matter of seconds instead of weeks, which results in time efficiency and cost savings."

The project award is estimated at $100,000. While that amount is hardly staggering, it's just one in a long line of awards from the state to BIS that, put together, have landed a considerable amount of business for the reseller. (BIS, a privately held company, declines to specify those dollar amounts, but indicates that the state of Oklahoma's contract awards have accounted for a large volume of work that has fueled much of the company's growth in recent years.)

In May 2004, Oklahoma officially named BIS the state's preferred document-imaging/content-management products and services partner. This partnership covers work that potentially involves all state agencies, counties, school districts, local municipalities and higher-education institutions as authorized users. The bottom line: While agencies can pursue other solution-provider partners--and the Agriculture Department did explore that possibility--they can avoid the bidding process and pursue a contract with BIS directly as long as the agency maintains an existing enterprise agreement with the company.

That partnership agreement followed an award-winning effort in which BIS integrated a similar major document-capture conversion effort for the state's Department of Human Services in 2004. Previously, BIS had successfully completed projects with the state's agencies, overseeing its roads, tax commission, public safety and commerce, among many others. "That experience helps us tremendously," Lugafet says. "There's a Department of Central Services here that audits us. Believe me, if one agency client isn't happy, the other agencies will know after the audit."

BIS has landed upon a niche that's getting widespread attention in the government sector. According to Reston, Va.-based market researcher Input, knowledge management, a category for which content-management solutions are a driving force, will account for more than $1.1 billion in federal spending by fiscal year 2009, up from $850 million in fiscal year 2004. (No state or local government projections were available, although industry insiders say that growth of sales in state and local government is impressive as well.)

Overall, the content-management industry is valued at nearly $2.8 billion in software alone, with the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) estimating that hardware, maintenance, service and other IT sales points are driving that overall industry figure to three to four times that value.

Other BIS government customers include Howard County in greater Washington, D.C.; the state of Alabama; the Department of the Interior, the Air Force, Department of Justice and Bureau of Indian Affairs.

For the Oklahoma Ag Department job, BIS had its work cut out for it, as the project presented unique geographical and logistical challenges: Oklahoma has no less than 83,500 farms and ranches, and nearly three-quarters of the state's 45 million acres are used for agricultural purposes. Ride along Interstate 35 and you will see seemingly endless crops of corn, wheat and cotton--not to mention herds of cattle, pig farms and horse ranches. And there are a grand total of just 50 employees to oversee all of this real estate.

Being that one company can be regulated for a number of different reasons, such as for pesticides, herbicides and pricing structure, among other criteria, they'll often have to fill out forms and make payments to procure several different types of licenses. That has only contributed to the paper mountain that keeps getting higher. For consumer complaints, a single charge over pesticides could total 200 pieces of paper or more, and the situation was getting unmanageable.

BIS has divided the conversion project in two parts--integrating a primary content-management system first, and implementing distributed scanning next. After that, there will be two other phases before the overall project is expected to be completed within 18 months.

Numerous vendor products were woven into the finished product: state-of-the-art Canon scanners; EMC's Documentum ApplicationXtender; Kofax Ascent Capture; and Kelly Registration Systems Interface. The Department of Agriculture began scanning documents in July 2004. The Canon scanners and Kofax product captured images and data, which were then integrated with EMC's product to be indexed and archived for easy processing and future retrieval in real-time. The Kelly Registration Systems Interface also allows the state's Ag Department employees to interact with counterparts in other states, converting data about recommended pesticide levels from one state into a highly readable, Web-based document that one or more states can use. The solution is able to flag duplicate records and group them together, if needed. And if someone is in the field, the completed system allows them to use PCs, mobile devices and digital cameras to feed data and photos into the system, which can be accessed by all employees.

Also implemented were BIS-created MasterScan and MasterScan Media Distribution, which allow for an employee--whether in the office or in the field--to retrieve documents automatically. The MasterScan products allow employees to burn self-executable CDs containing specific documents, which are sent to lawyers at their request. All of this cuts costs, of course. Document-gathering tasks that took days or weeks now take a minute. The department is now reducing staff by attrition, and, generally, is saving no less than $400 per boxful of documents requested, the state estimates.

BIS has found that providing tools produced in-house adds a lot of value to its offerings as a reseller. "There have been so many times when we've found that the off-the-shelf products out there don't meet the needs of one of our clients," Lugafet says. "I can think of at least two instances in the past where we would not have gotten a contract without the products we've produced in-house."

In Oklahoma, the possibilities seem endless. For starters, the Ag Department envisions having data pinpointing livestock bloodlines rolled into the system. And that's not all. "Everybody in every department can access the data and paperwork," Naylor says. "We now send out license-renewal notices by mail. We want to get to a point where we can do this in an automated way, with online applications and e-mail. That can be part of a latter stage in this. We're not there yet, but we want to be."

Major Players in Content Management

Client Network Services Inc. (CNSI): This Rockville, Md.-based solution provider's "Electronic Vital Records" project for the state of New Hampshire has allowed the state's 120 funeral homes, 10 hospitals, 250 town/city clerk offices and other care facilities to register all vital event data, such as births, deaths, divorces and marriages, directly into the centralized database. With records dating back to 1640, the system performs a wide variety of tasks, from the capture or registration of the vital event to creating and running statistical reports and printing legal certificates.

Silanis Technology: This Montreal-based reseller is implementing a solution for the Army that upgraded an existing digital file system. The Army had the ability to convert paper-based forms into digital files that could be accessed from an official Web site. However, while it was possible to fill in the form and store the data electronically, users were forced to print a paper copy, manually sign and then hand-carry or mail it to complete the authorization process. The new system, using IBM content-management tools, uses e-forms and digital signatures.

The Dayhuff Group: This Columbus, Ohio-based VAR oversaw a major enterprise content-management project for the Ohio Public Utilities Commission, resulting in the translation of 3.1 million documents within a legacy system. Using tools such as its IBM Lotus Domino Enterprise Server 5.0 software, Dayhuff replaced the legacy-case information database with a product called iCase Advantage, which let the commission track all incoming documents and enabled employees to view cases online. It also implemented a Kofax Ascent scanning system that can handle 2,600 pages a day by using IBM tools for Windows to store the data.

Northwoods Consulting Partners: This solution provider, also based in Columbus, integrated Hyland Software tools to digitize and streamline mission-critical, case-management files, health-care data, collection/disbursement information and other content used by social-services agencies in 22 Ohio counties.

Active Data Services: Via data capturing, management and distribution, this Morrisville, N.C.-based solution provider has inputted HR records for Wake County, N.C., public schools into an online application, saving school principals the time of driving to a central office to access them.