Five Steps to Implementing a Content Services Platform

Five steps for adopting a content services platform

In the age of content services, many organizations already have some sort of technology in place for document management- usually in a scan and retrieve capacity. As strategic executives look to make the shift, they are faced with many challenges in ensuring a successful project, adoption, and ongoing use of the technology. Keith Macedo, IT Director for the City of Fayetteville, Arkansas, shares some advice from the success and failures found in his team’s experience of implementing Laserfiche and replacing their legacy document management system. While Fayetteville replaced their city-wide Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Solution, they took the opportunity to implement a best in class content services solution to complement the new ERP.

"As strategic executives look to make the shift, they are faced with many challenges in ensuring a successful project, adoption, and ongoing use of the technology."

Keith shared the following as the main takeaways found while implementing Laserfiche within multiple departments in the City of Fayetteville.

Five Steps for Adopting a Content Services Platform

1. Identify Your Departmental Champions
You need to have someone in each department impacted who will champion your project. This is crucial for ensuring adoption of the project and helping users come up with new ideas for using your CSP.
2. Identify Project Champion
You must have a champion of the project. In our situation, the IT department was the project champion. We are constantly selling Laserfiche to the departments and identifying how it will help departments be more efficient in their processes.
3. Start Small
Build momentum first. Focus on smaller projects to build the momentum for the larger projects. We focused on smaller two-step processes that were time-consuming for end users. These types of small wins helped pave the way for bigger wins in the future. For example, our city had ten different processes for documenting and posting meeting agendas and minutes. Through the Laserfiche automation tools we showed how to easy it is to upload and automate filing with workflows.
4. Automate to the Fullest
Start by, eliminating the paper as much as possible--but don't stop here. Next, with other applications to streamline the data entry side. This was a big focus of ours in every project and really helped build our credibility and gain approval from the end users.
5. Train, Train, Train
Start reoccurring training with the IT department. We wanted to make sure our users felt supported and always had access to our power users. We had power users in IT know every module in Laserfiche to its fullest, to help make sure we approached each project with the best practices in mind.

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