How State and Local Agencies Are Going Paperless

Officials in the Juvenile Division of the San Diego District Attorney’s Office had talked about increasing the agency’s use of document management for several years. But after the economy crashed in 2008 and tax receipts slowed, the Microsoft SharePoint project that Deputy District Attorney Mark Whitmore had pitched years earlier was given top priority. Suddenly, doing more with less was a matter of survival.  

Today, district attorneys, probation officers and public defenders — the primary players in a juvenile case — receive case documents via a SharePoint portal well before a hearing.

“In the past, people would come to court and complain that they didn’t receive a document, which would force a postponement and tie cases up in the courts,” says Whitmore, who also served as business analyst on the SharePoint initiative, known as the Justice Electronic Library System.

Whitmore says one of the main benefits of JELS is that the district attorneys (and many of the county’s probation officers and public defenders) come to court with notebook computers. Having the attorneys go fully electronic was a major cultural shift, he adds.

“The attorneys used to come to court with a cart stacked with 25 to 30 case files that they would spread across a 4-foot-by-6-foot desk,” he explains. “Now, they use their notebooks to access the case documents and can do legal research while sitting at the desk right during a hearing.”

Although paper copies of the documents still must be filed with the court, Whitmore says JELS delivers much greater efficiencies than the old system. Before JELS, a paper document had to be copied four times and then hand-delivered to all the parties. Attorneys now handle up to 100 hearings a day in five courtrooms and save 1 million pages a year.

San Diego County Assistant CIO Susan Green says the project cost around $250,000. That’s well below the multimillion dollar automation projects that the county typically takes on.

“It was not an expensive project, especially given the return,” Green says. “Our department took on the management of this project because we knew it would be a success and a game changer,”

Mark Gilbert, a research vice president at Gartner, says many organizations are trying to get more value out of their SharePoint deployments.

“SharePoint offers a good basic document management capability,” Gilbert says. “It’s like a Swiss army knife in that organizations can run it over a portal, it has decent workflow, and it lets IT managers build intranets.”

Stored on the Portal

A good document management system can save more than just paper. Rick Petrecca, manager of systems integration and deployment strategies for Indianapolis and Marion County, Ind., says SharePoint lets the city save on computer storage because documents that used to reside in 10 or 15 locations now are stored just once on the portal.

Petrecca says the city started slowly, using SharePoint to post documentation for the IT staff. Today, Indianapolis uses SharePoint for a broad cross-section of the city’s more than 30 departments.

For example, Petrecca says, the city parks department now uses SharePoint to distribute box lunches more efficiently to the children who attend summer recreation programs. He says in the past, recreation counselors would fax in their lunch orders to the city, but the parks staff either couldn’t keep up with the faxes or paper copies would get lost.

The result was that the parks staff would often overestimate what was needed and send too many lunches to a recreational site. Petrecca says far too often, food would go uneaten and have to be thrown out after a couple of days. Now, all the lunch orders are posted immediately in SharePoint, so the parks staff knows exactly how many lunches to order. Counselors receive exactly what they need, which means less food is wasted.

“Given that there’s not that much money available for these programs to begin with, being able to reduce waste is really important,” Petrecca adds.