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Document Management
Image and Integrate
11/1/2007
It's no longer enough to digitize and store
documents: Today's campus staffers need to route,
track, access, annotate, link, and so much more—
across departments, buildings, and campuses.
CAROL HARRISON IS THE REGISTRAR AT the College of Southern Maryland, and back in the days of paper, she used to have a problem: keeping track of students' records, especially as they moved from one department to another, and through one process or system after another. It wasn't that the records disappeared; they were just, well, occasionally hard to find. For example, she had to a) keep student applications on file; b) route copies to the staffers who review them, and make sure that their comments were attached to the appropriate copies of the appropriate applications; c) coordinate the communication among the reviewers; and d) somewhere along the line be able to access the annotated records, to give students timely feedback.
Clearly, Harrison needed a better document management system. Her predicament was not unusual: Universities everywhere have come to realize that shuffling papers and folders back and forth; hiring and training people to manage filing systems; and storing thousands upon thousands of applications, forms, policies, regulations, and other documents all are costing time, money, and even space. Gradually, institutions of higher education have been adopting systems that store, track, and send files back and forth electronically. Today, registrars like Harrison are finding that their document tracking and management headaches are a thing of the past.
One Solution, Two Stories
For Harrison, the change came in 2005, when her college rolled out ImageNow, developed by Perceptive Software. After her office started using the software, the Department of Continuing Education adopted it, then the Bursar, Instructional Technology, and Human Resources. Today, virtually the entire College of Southern Maryland (comprising 21,000 students, 440 full-time faculty and staff, 336 part-time faculty and staff, four campuses, and 100 programs of study) is a web of document management system connections, and Harrison claims the system "does amazing things."
Now, when a prospective student applies to the college, he can fax the application, e-mail it, enter it on the college's website, or fill it out in longhand and mail it in; any which way, the document is scanned and filed into a central repository. From there, advisers can not only access it from virtually anywhere in the world, but they can search among all the applications for specific categories such as "Community Service.
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