In today’s information-centric age, government organizations face the daunting challenge of offering enhanced services to citizens while simultaneously improving efficiencies and cutting costs.
Let’s face it, whether you’re talking about the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank Act, changing food and drug safety standards, governing interstate land sales, or a mandate in Massachusetts that requires daycares to brush children’s teeth after lunch (check the reg for yourself), one thing is for sure, massive amounts of information will be generated.
This information will undoubtedly live in millions of documents and records. As always when dealing with the federal government, intense compliance and auditing (both internally and externally) activities need to be incorporated. If that wasn’t enough, recent years have seen a huge push on federal agencies to:
- Invest in shared services
- Increase ROI and reduce costs
- Increase Communications with Citizens
- Increase inter and intra-agency collaboration
One thing is for sure, you can absolutely expect for the business processes that govern this information to become more complex.
Many business processes will be required to author, review, process, and distribute information. With compliance and auditing (internal and external) activities in the mix, you can expect an increased need for collaboration and information sharing, and increased reporting requirements – all in the face of enormous growth in content generation and replication.
And although the “Inventor of the Internet” has his own system to manage information, it may not be optimal for anyone collaborating with him.
Many organizations point to compliance and lack of control as major drivers of adopting an enterprise content management (ECM) solution. ECM technology has enormous potential to add value by helping government organizations streamline and automate workflow and records management. ECM is increasingly being used to help manage the lifecycle of unstructured content such as images, documents, reports and web sites, while maintaining the integrity of that content and controlling access to authorized personnel, whether they are located within or outside the organization.
While there are a number of established ECM products in the market, a number of our government customers are asking us to do the same thing that they are being asked: do more with less.
Doing more with less is a pervasive theme throughout the federal government and is quickly being applied to budget-conscious organizations. As organizations assess resources, functions, and initiatives to support a diminishing budget, information technology spending often becomes the subject of reduction.
This has resulted in a variety of trends across the federal government as CIO’s and CTO’s embark on the challenge of meeting increasing requirements with diminishing funds, such as:
- Cloud-First Initiative (published February 8, 2011) states that “for the Federal Government, cloud computing holds tremendous potential to deliver public value by increasing operational efficiency and responding faster to constituent needs.” CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO
- Shared-First Initiative (published May 2, 2012) requires that agencies use a shared approach to IT service delivery in an effort to increase collaboration and efficiency. CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO
- Digital Government Initiative (published May 23, 2012) which requires that “the US Federal government adjusts to this new digital world and seize the opportunity to procure and manage devices, applications, and data in a smart secure and affordable way through the rapid dissemination of lessons learned from early adopters of new technologies.” The initiative goes on to say that agencies should leverage existing services and contacts, build for multiple use cases at once, use common standards and architectures, participate in open source communities, and launch shared government-wide solutions and contract vehicles. CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO
When asked to meet the challenge of helping our numerous federal clients “Do More With Less,” we always seem to come back around to the platform that can answer each of these challenges:
Alfresco
The proven Alfresco open source content platform delivers on all of the objectives of all three of these initiatives. Alfresco is a robust, scalable, and high performance open source Enterprise Content Management platform that is utilized to automate the capture/creation, maintenance and management, and disposal of content. As the ONLY open source records management platform that is certified to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Interoperability Test Command Product Register DoD 5015.2 STD, the Alfresco solution provides all of the functionality needed to help government organizations capture, classify, control and manage of a wide range of electronic records.
The Alfresco platform also uses flexible, open-standards architecture to provide a full range of information technology services within a single repository, allowing government organizations to apply multiple use cases to their investment. These include:
- Document Management
- Web Content Management – through easy integration with existing or new systems, such as Drupal or Crafter Software
- Records Management
- Collaboration
- Federated Search Software
- Case Management
- Document/ Records Capture
- eDiscovery
Armedia’s experience deploying Alfresco solutions has allowed our customers to do more with less by providing:
- Cost advantage – A low cost, subscription model with minimal upfront investment that can be driven out of operating expense as opposed to capital expense
- Flexibility – The ability to modify the source code enables agencies to respond more rapidly to changing situations, evolving requirements
- Greater Customer Choice – Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by reusing existing hardware, software and skills. No lock-in to one enterprise content management vendor or one stack.
Armedia has leveraged Alfresco’s open architecture to integrate it with legacy applications and data sources as well as automate and streamline cumbersome manual processes – benefitting our government customers by enabling them to better comply with regulations, protect sensitive information, increase operating efficiency, reduce data processing costs and improve the quality of information available to government employees and citizens.
Examples of our Alfresco experience and solutions can be viewed below:
Case Study: Department of Housing and Urban Development
Case Study: FederalConference.com
News Release: Gwinnett County and Alfresco
Once agencies have stored and secured their information, I’m finding more and more agency looking to leverage natural language processing (NLP) technologies to exploited the unstructured information. NLP technologies in entity extraction, speech to text, fact extraction, content analytics, etc. has matured well over the last few years.