Virginia’s Office of the Commissioner of the Revenue (COR) is a constitutional office of the Commonwealth of Virginia and Hanover County. The Commissioner is responsible for assessing personal and business property, maintaining real estate ownership information, overseeing the land use program, state income tax filing process, and the tax relief program.
The COR office is a Hanover County leader for digital automation, leveraging Laserfiche for Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Many departments across the County followed suit by implementing the Content Services Platform (CSP) after seeing their success.
New to the department, the Commissioner’s first concerns were Business Continuity and the efficient use of the staff’s time. Filing cabinets overran the office space, even the hallways! Their team spent hours each day manually searching for physical documents.
They considered disaster recovery questions:
- What would they do if the building flooded?
- What if there was a fire?
- If they couldn’t access the building and needed remote access, how would they retrieve the necessary documents?
Content Services addresses business continuity concerns and more.
Starting small and winning at each step. The first step started with a problem that plagues many agencies – scanning documents from a sea of filing cabinets. The COR office manages over 40,000 documents a year. Their first win was saving time not filing paper every single day. That was an unexpected benefit.
In-house digital documents saved hours each day and freed their staff from menial tasks, such as filing and alphabetizing. By starting phase one of their digital transformation journey, the customer service experience provided a faster and more efficient turnaround time.
“I’m just glad to never manually to alphabetize files again,” said Deputy Commissioner of Revenue, Amy Johnson, for Hanover County, Virginia.
“Some of your wins are going to be ones you don’t expect. One of the first unexpected wins of this project was the time not spent filing paper. Once documents were digitized and the process set up, we saw bigger milestones and project success. Remember to celebrate the small things,” shared Amy.
The COR’s office recommends working with the Laserfiche community and other industry leaders who are current software users. Not only does it assist in the planning process, but it also becomes a resource to gain leadership buy-in to visualize the benefits of a solution. Your case will prove itself by providing tangible benefit examples and enable other departments or agencies cost-savings.
