The Breaking Point: "Is This 1995?"
North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (NC DEQ) leadership didn’t need a consultant to tell them something was wrong. They saw it with their own eyes.
During a major round of water infrastructure grant applications, agency leadership visited the team to see how things were going. What they found stopped them cold.
Outside the building sat a card table. Staff in suits were walking up carrying paper binders, each one being stamped as received. Inside, agency employees were manually re-entering every piece of data from those binders into digital systems — data that had just been written down on paper by the same applicants.
“Is this 1995?” one leader asked. “There was such a better way to do this. Our employees needed to be doing their professional work, not data entry.”
That moment crystallized what leadership had already suspected. NC DEQ was operating on a patchwork of legacy systems that didn’t communicate with each other, paper-heavy processes that consumed staff time and office space, and institutional practices that hadn’t kept pace with what technology could now deliver.
The binder table was the symptom. The challenge ran deeper.
Daily Detour: The Silver Tsunami Risk with Institutional Knowledge
A 24% vacancy rate, a retirement cliff, and a quarter of the office taken up by paper
NC DEQ’s operational challenges weren’t limited to one difficult application day. They were structural — and they were converging at the same time.
At the time the agency began its modernization effort, roughly 40 percent of staff could retire within the next five years. Decades of institutional knowledge (processes, relationships, informal expertise) were on the verge of walking out the door. So much was at risk of being lost, and the agency needed staff spending their time working with information, not hunting for it.
Vacancy rates compounded the pressure. Around 24 percent of positions were open, including a significant share of technical roles. Staff who remained were absorbing the workload of those who weren’t there.
Meanwhile, the agency’s physical footprint told its own story. Approximately one-quarter of NC DEQ’s office space was occupied by paper storage. Lab equipment still ran on outdated operating systems, creating data security risks alongside efficiency problems. Systems that were supposed to work together didn’t. Staff entered the same data multiple times across disconnected platforms.
And through all of it, six billion dollars in water infrastructure funding was flowing through the agency, with demand for grant applications, permit processing, and public records responses only growing.
Something had to change.
The Game Changer: Project No Binders: The First Big Win
Three to four months. One process. Nearly $50,000 saved.
Agency leadership brought the case for a data modernization initiative to North Carolina’s governor. He approved it. Notably, the Republican-controlled general assembly did too, a rare bipartisan moment driven by the operational case, not the politics.
With investment secured and a new Chief Data Officer position established, Miriam Patrocinio, who had already been working on data strategy within the agency, stepped into the role, and NC DEQ moved quickly.
The first target: grant application intake. The team used Laserfiche to build a digital submission workflow, replacing the paper binder process entirely. The project took roughly three to four months.
The impact was immediate. In the first round of applications processed through the new digital system, the agency documented nearly $50,000 in staff time savings. Employees who had been manually stamping, logging, and re-entering data were freed to do other work.
But the most striking proof of the new system came unexpectedly.
The first major application deadline under the digital process fell on the same day Hurricane Ian made landfall in North Carolina. Under the old system, local government officials would have been on flooded roads driving binders to Raleigh. Under the new system, submissions came in online from wherever applicants were. Staff worked safely. The agency’s phone lines stayed clear. The deadline was met without interruption.
“We could never predict, but complacency is the enemy of progress,” Patrocinio said. “We had Hurricane Ian coming to North Carolina, and we were glad to know there were no local leaders on the road traveling to bring us their applications. Our staff was safe. The leaders were safe. Our systems didn’t flinch.”
About our Client
CLIENT NAME:
CHAMPION:
Miriam Patrocinio
Chief Data Officer
POPULATION:
2 million+
DEPARTMENT STAFF:
700+
SOLUTIONS:
Project ROI
Nearly $50,000 Saved in Staff Time (first round of funding)
$3B in Applications Tracked in Real-Time Dashboards
FOIA Requests Reduced from 29 Days to a Couple of Days
Other Spotlights
Skip the Busywork: Real-Time Data Changes How an Agency Operates
$3 billion in applications. Tracked by the hour.
The digital intake system didn’t just remove the binder table. It gave NC DEQ something it had never had: a live window into what was happening.
Petrosino’s team connected the Laserfiche intake process to Power BI dashboards that refreshed hourly, displaying application volume as it accumulated in real time. Agency leadership and staff watched the numbers climb.
“We saw the first million of requests come in, then the second, then the third, then the fourth, and the fifth,” Patrocinio said. “Not only were we measuring how much we could disperse to the population, we could show that the need was much greater than that, which was used by agency leadership to advocate for the state and bring more funds to North Carolina. That’s when the data comes alive.”
In a single round of funding, the agency received and tracked $3 billion in applications through this system. That data didn’t just inform operations, it became an evidence base for policy and funding advocacy.
The real-time visibility also enabled workforce planning. With applications being categorized and forecasted as they arrived, leadership could identify which divisions were about to face a workload surge and respond before it hit. One division projected a 78 percent increase in permit applications. Another was forecasting a 28 percent increase. Because those projections were visible months in advance, the agency could train staff across divisions, manage workload proactively, and meet federal timelines without scrambling.
Cut the Risks: Beat back the FOIA backlog
Grant processing was one challenge. Public records was another.
The agency had a clear vision for what it needed: a magnifying glass inside the digital file cabinet. The ability to search across everything at once, without having to check one repository at a time. When that challenge landed on Patrocinio’s desk, the answer came quickly.
“It’s called federated search,” Patrocinio said. “Imagine a Google search bar inside your Laserfiche repositories.”
The capability already existed within Laserfiche. NC DEQ simply hadn’t activated it yet. Working with MCCi, who Patrocinio credits as a critical partner, particularly given that her core team at the time consisted of herself and two colleagues, the agency built and deployed a federated search across its multiple Laserfiche repositories.
Staff could now search across the entire agency’s records in a single query, using keywords, wildcards, and full-text matching. Finding a document that previously required manually checking four different locations now takes seconds.
The results were measurable. Average first-response time for public records requests dropped from 29 days to a couple of days.
“Right now, our staff can do that with ease,” Patrocinio said. “And it’s available to everyone, but your partner can help with that.”
Building for What's Next: AI, GIS, and Governance First
Good infrastructure today means better tools tomorrow.
With a digitized intake process, searchable records, and real-time data flowing through dashboards, NC DEQ had built something more valuable than a collection of efficiency wins. It had built an infrastructure that could support what comes next.
Patrocinio is deliberate about the sequencing. Before any conversation about AI tools, the data environment has to be ready.
“AI is an excellent tool that will provide results proportional to the level of organization you have inside your data environment,” she said. “Garbage in, garbage out — still very true today, more than ever before.”
NC DEQ is currently using Laserfiche AI to capture handwritten notes embedded in documents, automate template population, and accelerate progress toward WCAG accessibility compliance. The agency is approximately 85 percent compliant across its document repository, with AI-assisted tools closing the remaining gap.
The team is also working toward seamless GIS integration, allowing staff to move from a geographic location on a map directly into the underlying permit record, document, or dashboard without switching platforms. Drone imagery and real-time data capture for natural disaster response are also in development.
Underpinning all of it is a Data Governance Council that Patrocinio established early in the process, with executive sponsorship from the cabinet. The council includes the Chief Data Officer, the Cabinet Secretary, and the Chief Deputy Secretary at the top, extending down to data stewards across every division.
“Governance is the backbone of an organization,” Patrocinio said. “If you want it quick and fast, fine. But if you want it to last, you need governance.”
What Made It Work: Leadership, Culture, and the Right Partner
We are not about technology. We are about people.
The technology was available. The results were achievable. What made NC DEQ’s modernization effort succeed where others stall came down to three things: leadership, culture, and partnership.
The agency built the political and organizational case before a single line of code was written. Bipartisan funding was secured, the Chief Data Officer role was created, and monthly all-hands meetings brought staff along before changes arrived at their desks. The goal was not compliance — it was ownership.
“We weren’t seeking agreement,” Patrocinio said. “We were seeking collaboration. There’s a big difference. It lowers the temperature in the room.”
Staff who started the process saying “please don’t let me go first” ended up asking “can I get on the list?” That shift didn’t happen by accident. It happened because leadership invested in listening sessions, hands-on demonstrations, division-level conversations, and creative change management exercises — all before rollout.
Petrosino describes her operating philosophy simply: fail fast, learn faster. Not every experiment goes as planned. The goal isn’t to be right the first time. The goal is to learn quickly and keep moving.
And through it all, the partnership with MCCi gave a small internal team the implementation support, technical depth, and hands-on collaboration needed to move at the pace the agency’s vision required.
“Laserfiche was a tremendous tool helping us execute and implement that vision,” Petrosino said. “And the support that we have just fuels our creativity and pushes the envelope to see what else we can do.”
Ready to See What's Possible for Your Agency?
NC DEQ started with a card table, a rubber stamp, and a hard question about why so much still ran on paper. Four years later, the agency is processing billions in grant applications in real time, responding to public records requests in days, and building AI-ready data infrastructure that scales.
The tools exist. The path is proven. And you don’t have to figure it out alone.