January 2000
State & Local Government:
Public Information, Private-sector Approaches
By Russell Letson
To those who think government agencies are followers rather than leaders in improving
efficiency and service, here are two examples that just might change your mind. The Louisiana
Department of Natural Resources (DNR) runs a public-access Web site that rivals anything you will find
in the world of flashy dot-com startups. In Marion County, Indiana, the Department of Public Health
has improved internal access to information and public service with a workflow-enabled solution worthy
of a major insurance company.
Legacy Resources Drive State Revenue
The Louisiana DNR is the custodian of about 50 million documents covering every aspect of oil and gas
production in the state. Wells and fields are tracked through their entire life cycle, leaving a trail
of leases, production records, field orders, compliance documents, permits, amended permits, core
samples, geological surveys and “electric logs” of well activity. Computerized records go
back to the 1970s, but cards, microfilm, fiche and paper documents of different sizes, shapes and
colors reach back to the mid-1930s and even earlier.
The DNR has to secure, preserve and disseminate all this information, and SONRIS 2000 (Strategic
Online Natural Resources Information System) is the tool they have built to do it. SONRIS serves not
only as the DNR’s own operational information system but also as the host for a trio of Web-based
applications designed to allow anyone with Internet access to view any of the 3.5 million records
currently entered into the databases.
DNR Undersecretary Bob Harper explains that the project was funded in order “to make the
information available to the oil and gas industry to encourage them to continue to develop oil and gas
properties in the state.”
There’s good reason for the state to encourage exploration: it gets 12.5% of the value of oil and
gas severed from the state, and there’s about $300 million in income from leasing state water
bottoms for oil and gas production.
All four of the Department’s major divisions (Office of the Secretary, Conservation, Mineral
Resources, and Coastal Restoration and Management) use and contribute to SONRIS 2000. The business
application manages all the digital information about the production of any oil or gas well (location,
operator, transporter, amount transported, and so on). A FileNet (www.filenet.com) application handles
electronic documents and images of millions of paper documents covering all aspects of oil and gas
production. A GIS (geographical information system) application maps all the gas and oil wells and
fields in the state and displays information about particular installations at the click of a mouse.
SONRIS 2000 is built on a three-tier, client-server architecture. The Oracle 8 database servers, GIS
and business applications run under Unix; the FileNet servers are NT. The servers draw on 1.1
terabytes of storage in HP optical jukeboxes and Symmetrix disk arrays. The whole DNR building is
wired with fiber optics and fast Ethernet and a Novell LAN connects all the pieces.
DNR’s custom Web application runs on top of FileNet and requires a browser plus a pair of
plug-ins (FileNet’s Panagon viewer and an Oracle query engine) to search for and display any data
in the system. The plug-ins are big — 20 megabytes combined — but they can be downloaded
from the site or obtained on a CD-ROM that the Department offers free of charge to anyone requesting
it.
“Once we had the system, it took us barely three months to get everything configured,” says
Rizwan Ahmed, DNR’s director of information technology. “In early 1999 we started scanning
the documents, and by mid-year we had almost 3.5 million documents done.”
Ahmed describes the project as an “out-of-the-box” implementation that worked. “We
didn’t do any coding, we implemented as-is,” he says. Later, they added some front-end
customizing via Visual Basic and the FileNet API.
While the deployment was fairly easy, getting to the point of implementation required careful
preparation. In the DNR’s Information Technology Management department, project manager Pat
Derozan and supervisor Ken Freeman held user group meetings to get a handle on just how documents were
used internally. “Field orders, for example, were the first set of documents we converted,”
says Derozan. “We met with all the users [and discovered that they] all filed them in different
ways. We went into their business process and understood how they used the documents and how often
they used them. We did a detailed document survey and from that we did analysis and evaluation, then
planned an indexing scheme that would fit all those uses.”
They also ran a pilot project for both internal and external system users including land owners,
lawyers, engineers, geologists, researchers, graduate students and investors.
“We selected several petroleum and geological engineering societies and organizations to help
us,” says Derozan. “They expressed interest in the project right off, so we got their
involvement in testing.”
The DNR continues to keep an eye on customer and constituent needs through public forums and seminars
and Internet question-and-answer sessions. “As soon as we discover a particular screen or report
they require,” says Ahmed, “we can easily turn around and give it to them.”
The rollout was in part a marketing effort. To make the system attractive and useful from the start,
Freeman says they chose their initial release of documents carefully for “the most return for
citizens,” to show how valuable the system could be. Apparently it worked. The site has been used
by 500 private organizations from all 50 states and ten countries.
Public access to public information, and not profit, is the DNR’s mission with SONRIS 2000. In
fact, the department is forbidden by law to turn a profit, but Ahmed (who came to government from two
decades in business) is keenly aware of the value of the service. He says, “If I were sitting on
a private structure, I can promise you we would have made a ton of money with this product.”
Getting a Handle on Public Health Records
The Marion County Public Health Department handles the largest volume of records of any such
jurisdiction in Indiana. Serving the Indianapolis metro area, the department generates about a third
of the state’s vital-records data. This involves creating, tracking and disseminating the records
of “human life events” such as births, deaths and adoptions. This information, much of it
considered confidential, is the feedstock for health and population statistics.
According to Julie Bishop, administrator of vital statistics, the PHD’s imaging and document
management system was a spinoff of Y2K planning. “Since we were changing everything anyway —
moving everything off the mainframe to a client-server environment — why not just get it all
messed up at once, and then we’ll be ready to go,” she explains. The result is anything
but a mess. Planning was extensive and detailed, worked out with the help of imaging and document
management consultant Don Byers of Crowe Chizek, an Indianapolis accounting and consulting firm.
[Within a year,] Chizek and the department assembled a project team that included staff with expertise
in IT and various work processes. Byers recalls that they did a lot of thinking about what they wanted
to accomplish and what the obstacles would be. “Those are the questions that you need to
wrestle with right in the beginning,” he says. “Most people jump right into the technology.
They don’t step back and ask the hard questions, which are, ‘what’s the business
problem I’m trying to fix, and how will I fail?”
While the Department already had electronic databases of birth and death certificates covering the
last few decades, they also had about three million microfilm records going back to 1872, all filmed
in different ways. Any new system, Bishop saw, would have to have an open architecture and be able to
integrate new images with the existing databases. The department also decided that they needed more
than backfile conversion and new-paperwork imaging. The application demanded a workflow application to
make sure that documents, images and microfilm went where they were supposed to go and that the
governmental users and public customers were served properly.
The result of all the planning is a quantum leap over their old office-automation LAN. They chose an
OnBase system from Hyland Software (www.onbase.com) partly because it offered all the imaging and
document management functions they needed from a single vendor. Their Novell network now supports
three scanning stations, 30 workstations, a Compaq Proliant image server with RAID storage and a
Hewlett-Packard optical jukebox with its own Proliant server.
While it can’t be a completely paperless operation because of state signature and notarization
requirements for some documents, the system works as much as possible with electronic data and images.
Birth registrations, for example, start with electronic forms sent in via modem from hospitals and
licensed midwives. Death certificates, on the other hand, start with paper forms, generally filled out
by funeral directors. These certificates are delivered to the Marion County Department of Health,
where they are scanned, and then passed on to the state Department of Health for storage and
microfilming. Thereafter the county works with the image.
The workflow is an end-to-end application that covers every aspect of the department’s
activities, involving 12 main processes and 30 document types. Each major document has its own
processes. Death registration, for example, includes subsidiary workflows such as burial registration
and cause-of-death coding for statistical reporting.
Much of the design is meant, as Bishop says, “to help us keep on track, so that we don’t
lose sight of the fact that these things are priorities.” One queue tracks appointments with the
corrections clerk and sends the right images to her screen when the customer comes in. Another queue
automatically matches incoming documents to incomplete jobs — those waiting for court papers or a
coroner’s certificate — and sends them to the appropriate work queues.
On the customer service side, counter and mail service queues (for official copies of documents)
include an “expedite” subqueue to catch items that haven’t been taken care of within
certain time limits. If a transaction is not completed within 30 minutes, a supervisor is called.
Another way of staying on top of the work will be a “virtual” folder. “Eventually, if
we put someone’s name in, we will be able to bring up every document that we have in their system
that relates to that person, from birth to death,” says Bishop.
Despite its Big Brotherish sound, she explains that this is more a way of tracking documents than
people. “If [the] passport [office] calls and wants verification that the birth certificate that
they’re looking at is, in fact, the one we issued, we can bring the image up on the screen and
verify that,” she explains. “We can also verify when the application was made, and any
corrections made to the document would be available, such as misspellings.”
It’s not just a matter of tidiness or convenience. In matters such as questions of paternity,
Bishop says, “We’re actually performing legal changes to these documents that can be called
to court, so we need to be able to produce them in a timely manner and in a way that will be legally
acceptable.”
What Bishop calls “the other side of vital records” is a function that is not seen directly
by the public: collecting public health information for assessment by a variety of agencies and user
groups at the county, state and federal levels. Users include people who work with communicable and
sexually transmitted diseases, epidemiologists and health planners.
“Our data goes all the way to the National Center for Health Statistics,” she says, adding
that it’s usually statistically aggregated rather than identifiable information. “When you
hear the ten leading causes of death, you know that all these agencies are participating in that
count.”
Even in statistical work, though, she explains that “having the actual image available to the
people who work on the data analysis is important because sometimes [cause of death] codes don’t
give the full picture ... Sometimes they want to see the duration [of a disease] or more specific
information. We also query physicians for additional information, and those query letters are scanned
in and become a cross-reference to the death certificate.”
Careful planning and mapping of internal procedures and constituent needs has allowed the department
to play the roles of collector, guardian, service provider, retailer and analyst. Not bad for a county
office with just two dozen employees.
Collier County 'Adds the Web Piece'
The office of the Clerk of Courts in Collier County, FL, faced a familiar technological crisis
when their old text-indexing application was orphaned by its manufacturer. The office maintains and
disseminates all the minutes, ordinances, resolutions, agendas and related documents generated by the
Board of County Commissioners. Circuit Court Clerk Dwight Brock wanted more than just another indexing
product.
Brock felt the new system should not only manage records but also make them much more accessible to
the public and to county workers located in various locations. The system needed to be easy to use and
to maintain, and it needed to improve efficiency within the department while still being affordable.
Fortunately, the county was already building a traffic ticket system, and it made sense to have the
same VAR, Robert Porter of R&S Integrated (Lakeland, FL), set up a scan-to-web solution. The
system was built on the LaserFiche system from CompuLink (www.compulink.com).
“We were already licensed for the product,” explains James Taylor, the county’s senior
systems analyst. “All we had to do was add the Web piece and another database.” The
physical requirements turned out to be modest. The production scan station consists of an NT
workstation, a Fujitsu 3097DE duplex scanner and a Kofax 1700 image-processing board. The LaserFiche
application and image database resides on a Compaq dual-300 MHz server with Compaq RAID storage.
The hardest part was figuring how to serve both internal and public users without compromising network
security. The answer was to set up two image servers on different NT network segments separated by a
firewall. The Clerk’s staff maintains the image database and serves walk-in requests with the
internal system. The external machine handles dial-up traffic from the public and other county
offices. Updates were also tricky. “The volume of data was massive, and we couldn’t just
shove the whole thing across every night,” says Taylor. The solution was to use PKZip to
automatically compress new and changed files into a single file This update is sent to the Web
server nightly via one-way FTP, and every morning it is added to the database.
The system has been running for a year now. Court reporters take the minutes at Board meetings and
provide files in Word format. At the Clerk’s office, the files are printed and the various paper
documents submitted during the meeting are added to the whole package, which is then scanned, indexed
and OCR’d for full-text search. The LaserFiche application leaves the images in their native TIFF
format, which eliminates the need for any conversion stage for Web access. “As soon as documents
are available in the imaging system, they are available to the Web,” Porter explains. “The
system converts to JPEG on the fly. The TIFF image represents the official record.” Taylor says
that the printing stage could be eliminated using the system’s “Snapshot” feature,
which allows electronic files to be imaged and OCR’d directly For now, the clerical workers
are more comfortable working with paper documents, but staff supervisor Maureen Kenyon says she’s
looking forward to going paperless after the 20-year backlog of ordinances and minutes is put into the
system. “We want to get to the point where we can take everything in here and send it right
out to storage within a week’s time,” Kenyoh says.
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