The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) is the lead stewardship agency responsible for protecting North Carolina’s environmental resources. The agency, which has offices from the mountains to the coast, administers regulatory programs designed to protect air quality, water quality, and the public’s health, and also works to advance an all-of-the-above energy strategy that meets North Carolina’s needs.
Daily Detour: When Good Intentions Go Wrong
NCDEQ started using Laserfiche in 2017, but each division worked independently without any central strategy. Departments duplicated efforts unnecessarily, and finding documents became a nightmare due to the use of different systems and standards. Valuable time was wasted searching for critical files across these disconnected platforms. When Miriam joined in 2022, she saw the problem clearly: while the technology was powerful, the coordination was missing.
The Solution: Culture Comes First
But with education in both IT and psychology, Miriam knew that she couldn’t enforce change top-down. Instead, she anticipated some very human responses from staff members, particularly those without technology backgrounds: The need to be listened to, the need to have concerns validated, the need for education. She knew she needed to address these concerns before and during any changes she wanted to make.
That’s because, as she said, “Culture eats strategy and innovation for breakfast, lunch and dinner—every time.”
Bringing Non-IT Stakeholders to the Table
Miriam knows that many people have historically been excluded from technical discussions, such as administrative assistants and Laserfiche business users. When she began her job at NCDEQ, she took a monthslong tour of the division offices across the state to ensure that all voices were heard.
“[Business users] don’t have math or IT degrees. They don’t have the vocabulary of IT, so they will be shy, they will be quiet, they will hesitate to share their ideas because they don’t feel equipped to be at the table. I ask [myself], ‘How can I make them feel comfortable?’ It’s important to tell them what to expect and how to prepare. We always include an agenda, and we don’t speak jargon.”
As a result, Miriam was able to discover the true business needs of each division before investing in technology.
“For example, I found out that a lot of our engineers reviewed plans that are very complex and large in scale. The paper itself was large, so they needed conference rooms where they could roll out the paper and mark it with Sharpies.”
In talking with the engineers, she found that this process would be difficult to do digitally from a standard computer monitor.
“We tackled that by giving them touchscreen TV’s and equipment with software where they can mark those plans digitally. So they can do the entire lifecycle of their review digitally and collaborate through the software.”
The reaction was overwhelmingly positive:
“They love it. They adopted right away when they saw the solution, but I would never have thought of that if I hadn’t gone and visited them to see how they work.”
Fostering Collaboration
Business & Technology Application Specialist Jennifer Smith said that developers across NCDEQ used to feel isolated from each other, which contributed to duplicated efforts and stymied innovation.
To address this concern, Miriam established a developer group—a community of Laserfiche “super users” across the 11 divisions who share solutions and tackle challenges together. This shift empowered the team to support broader departmental goals.
As Jennifer put it, “By coming together through conferences, training, and talking, we became a very strong collaborative unit. ‘Two minds are better than one’ is an understatement. When you get a group of us in a room, it’s fabulous.”
Responding to Change Anxiety
Regardless of their role in the DEQ, Miriam knows that people experience anxiety any time there is change. They feel hesitant to get rid of documents—“just in case.”
“There are so many ‘just-in-case’s. One document is saved five different places and that’s not the most recent document. But that’s human nature—we stash things. I can’t force people not to do that.”
Instead of forbidding people to keep multiple versions of documents, Miriam focuses on data literacy. She listens and reassures them, explaining the purpose of keeping a single, updated record in Laserfiche and the downsides of multiple outdated documents.
Understanding the Strategy
To help business users across the department understand the changes that are taking place, Miriam develops trainings that are not just informative, but also relatable.
Miriam identified the need for an enterprise-wide strategy in several phases:
- Health assessments for each repository
- Integrations, including a federated search tool to search for documents throughout all repositories
- Standardization and data management
- Public-facing resources
Spotlight
CLIENT NAME:
CHAMPION:
Miriam Patrocinio
Chief Data Officer
POPULATION:
11.5 Million
SOLUTIONS:
Project ROI
47% reduction in records management costs.
$300,000 collected in three months.
$5 billion in grant requests tracked with precision.
Other Spotlights
The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) is the lead stewardship agency responsible for protecting North Carolina’s environmental resources. The agency, which has offices from the mountains to the coast, administers regulatory programs designed to protect air quality, water quality, and the public’s health, and also works to advance an all-of-the-above energy strategy that meets North Carolina’s needs.
Daily Detour: When Good Intentions Go Wrong
NCDEQ started using Laserfiche in 2017, but each division worked independently without any central strategy. Departments duplicated efforts unnecessarily, and finding documents became a nightmare due to the use of different systems and standards. Valuable time was wasted searching for critical files across these disconnected platforms. When Miriam joined in 2022, she saw the problem clearly: while the technology was powerful, the coordination was missing.
The Solution: Culture Comes First
But with education in both IT and psychology, Miriam knew that she couldn’t enforce change top-down. Instead, she anticipated some very human responses from staff members, particularly those without technology backgrounds: The need to be listened to, the need to have concerns validated, the need for education. She knew she needed to address these concerns before and during any changes she wanted to make.
That’s because, as she said, “Culture eats strategy and innovation for breakfast, lunch and dinner—every time.”
Bringing Non-IT Stakeholders to the Table
Miriam knows that many people have historically been excluded from technical discussions, such as administrative assistants and Laserfiche business users. When she began her job at NCDEQ, she took a monthslong tour of the division offices across the state to ensure that all voices were heard.
“[Business users] don’t have math or IT degrees. They don’t have the vocabulary of IT, so they will be shy, they will be quiet, they will hesitate to share their ideas because they don’t feel equipped to be at the table. I ask [myself], ‘How can I make them feel comfortable?’ It’s important to tell them what to expect and how to prepare. We always include an agenda, and we don’t speak jargon.”
As a result, Miriam was able to discover the true business needs of each division before investing in technology.
“For example, I found out that a lot of our engineers reviewed plans that are very complex and large in scale. The paper itself was large, so they needed conference rooms where they could roll out the paper and mark it with Sharpies.”
In talking with the engineers, she found that this process would be difficult to do digitally from a standard computer monitor.
“We tackled that by giving them touchscreen TV’s and equipment with software where they can mark those plans digitally. So they can do the entire lifecycle of their review digitally and collaborate through the software.”
The reaction was overwhelmingly positive:
“They love it. They adopted right away when they saw the solution, but I would never have thought of that if I hadn’t gone and visited them to see how they work.”
Fostering Collaboration
Business & Technology Application Specialist Jennifer Smith said that developers across NCDEQ used to feel isolated from each other, which contributed to duplicated efforts and stymied innovation.
To address this concern, Miriam established a developer group—a community of Laserfiche “super users” across the 11 divisions who share solutions and tackle challenges together. This shift empowered the team to support broader departmental goals.
As Jennifer put it, “By coming together through conferences, training, and talking, we became a very strong collaborative unit. ‘Two minds are better than one’ is an understatement. When you get a group of us in a room, it’s fabulous.”
Responding to Change Anxiety
Regardless of their role in the DEQ, Miriam knows that people experience anxiety any time there is change. They feel hesitant to get rid of documents—“just in case.”
“There are so many ‘just-in-case’s. One document is saved five different places and that’s not the most recent document. But that’s human nature—we stash things. I can’t force people not to do that.”
Instead of forbidding people to keep multiple versions of documents, Miriam focuses on data literacy. She listens and reassures them, explaining the purpose of keeping a single, updated record in Laserfiche and the downsides of multiple outdated documents.
Understanding the Strategy
To help business users across the department understand the changes that are taking place, Miriam develops trainings that are not just informative, but also relatable.
Miriam identified the need for an enterprise-wide strategy in several phases:
- Health assessments for each repository
- Integrations, including a federated search tool to search for documents throughout all repositories
- Standardization and data management
- Public-facing resources
“We’re an environmental organization, so in one of the last trainings, I compared digitization to a trail. I used the Mountains-to-Sea Trail that links the coast of North Carolina to the mountains to Tennessee.”
She explained that Phase 1, the health assessment of the repositories, is like assessing your fitness before starting a long hike. She continued the metaphor to illustrate how smaller processes (sub-trails) contribute to the broader organizational goals (main trail).
These relatable trainings have helped to foster a culture of continuous learning as she moves with the department through the phases of digital transformation.
“Miriam brings in the gift of time and process. She focuses on the journey versus just ‘get it done now,’ which helps a lot as well,” Jennifer said.
The Results: Massive Cost Reduction
But Miriam’s leadership isn’t just about good feelings—it has resulted in measurable impacts to her organization.
Cost Savings
Miriam’s strategic approach reduced NCDEQ’s records management costs by 47% in just two years by eliminating expenses tied to physical document storage.
Construction Permit Digitization
Prior to digitization, construction permit applications for projects disturbing more than one acre of land were paper-based. Applications required manual submission, processing, and approval. Renewals and payment tracking were cumbersome. Paper forms and email communications often conflicted, making it difficult to determine compliance and track fee payments.
Miriam and her team used Laserfiche to automate the process with:
- Online Forms: Applicants now submit construction permit applications via a web-based form.
- Automated Approval Workflows: The process includes automated routing for approval, eliminating manual steps.
- Payment Tracking: Fees can be paid electronically, with the system tracking compliance and payment status.
- Reminders: Automated email reminders are sent to applicants before permit renewals are due to improve compliance.
Not only did this improve employee morale and external customer service, the new, automated process collected nearly $300,000 in fees within the first quarter after it went live.
Using Data to Secure Federal Funding
Laserfiche transformed NCDEQ’s ability to manage and leverage data with:
- Workflows to process federal funding applications for infrastructure projects like clean water systems.
- Tracking of over $5 billion in grant requests by digitizing a previously paper-based project.
Data from this effort demonstrated the unmet needs across the state as part of a successful case for additional federal funding for environmental and infrastructure projects to benefit all North Carolina communities.