An eight member expedition team of City staff traveled together to Ft. Collins, Colorado yesterday to do a field visit to the City of Ft. Collins to see firsthand how that city government has implemented a sophisticated document management system that we are considering purchasing for our city.
The Eden Prairie team included IT Division staffmembers Lisa Wu & Mike Hutter; Police Department staffmembers Sandy Mitchell and Jim Morrow; Building Official Kevin Scheimg; Chief Finance Officer Sue Kotchevar; City Clerk Kitty Porta; and my Executive Assistant Lorene McWaters.
They got up early, flew to Denver, drove to Ft. Collins and then back to Denver, and flew home late last night. It was an all day adventure, and I appreciate the team’s willingness to put in the extra time and effort to go on this trip. This is an important project. They’ve been working on this project as a team for several months, so it was important to me that they take this one last step of due diligence before we make a major new investment in hardware and software. Once we buy it, we must make it work.
We are interested in a new document management system for several reasons. First, we maintain filing systems for paper documents in many different city offices using many different filing protocols. The system we are looking at would unify our filing systems and provide easier access to all files (with some exceptions, such as Police files) to employees in any department. So it would improve our ability to do work.
But another reason we’re interested in the system is that would improve our ability to provide greater access to public records to citizens. Most of our files are accessible to citizens via specific request under the State’s Open Records law. These requests, however, are not always easy to satisfy – for the City or for the person who wants the information. We believe the new document management system will improve our ability to respond faster to requests for information, perhaps even online. This improved ability to respond to requests will also benefit our productivity as well.
I will be getting together with the staff team and debriefing their field trip, and then we’ll make our final decision soon. We are planning to purchase and implement the new system in 2006.
