County agency creates more robust intranet

The San Mateo County Human Services Agency in California is using

Stellent's Universal Content Management solution to help comply with government regulations, as well as to reduce costs and improve customer service. The Agency provides economic, employment and healthcare coverage services to its residents.

"Like most government agencies, we must maintain compliance with a multitude of regulations while keeping our employees informed of government policy changes in a timely manner," says Clarisa Soriano, director of automation for the San Mateo County Human Services Agency. "As a result, we created tremendous amounts of paperwork, e-mails and forms, and incurred significant costs to manage and deliver this content across multiple offices and service centers. The new system enables us to reduce our information management challenges by making content easily accessible via a robust, multisite intranet."

According to a press release from Stellent, the new system gives ownership of intranet content to each of the Agency's five departments, 20 subdivisions and its call center. The Agency uses Stellent Site Studio, a multisite management application, to create, manage and publish microsites within the organization's intranet while ensuring each site complies with corporate brand and navigational standards.

"Because Site Studio empowers each of our departments to easily distribute its own content via the intranet, we have achieved optimal, timely communication across our organization and are better able to serve our clients," Soriano says.

In implementing the new system, the Agency also wanted to make its more than 75,000 case file documents readily accessible to call center employees.

"We employ 65 call center representatives who require on-demand access to case files when handling service calls," says Praveen Singh, IT supervisor for the San Mateo County Human Services Agency. "Now, these employees do not have to spend time trying to locate files in various file cabinets and storage areas; they can obtain them instantaneously through the intranet, significantly improving our ability to serve clients."

The Agency also uses the solution's document management and imaging capabilities to capture and publish paper-based documents, such as forms and case files. Employees can scan the content into the system using Kofax Ascent Capture, which is part of the Stellent Legacy Suite. Once scanned, the Stellent technology automatically converts forms and case files into PDFs, which are then available through the intranet. The agency no longer has to pay to print, copy and distribute those paper-based documents, and can cut costs related to backing up thousands of e-mail attachments each night, according to Stellent.