Since 2020 governments have pivoted their priorities to digital services, this experience was broadly lived in the aftermath of the pandemic. Citizens still needed to conduct business as licenses needed to be renewed, and records requests were still needed. But counter service was cut due to stay-at-home restrictions, so residents took to using web services en masse.
While not all states have reopened we’re getting really close. And this has major implications for both staff and IT, who will need to adapt user and resident supporting and play a greater role in partnering with management on the policies that augment overall work processes and a new culture.
The ramifications for IT continue to be huge: extended support hours including remote, increased user training, cloud and web enablement of business software, fostering all types of collaboration from documents to whiteboarding.
In addition, and arguably most critical, work processes need to be available via the internet and organizational networks. Because the staff is still working A/B schedules. Accordingly access to work environments and delivering effective user experience from any secure log-in location is now not just critical for convenience, but for effectiveness. Hence, staff must partner with IT not just consume IT tools.
Hybrid Work Has Been Around for Decades
Since before it was commonplace, CPS staff have worked in a hybrid environment. During the pandemic, we ensured that our clients stayed operational–if not innovative, with their Laserfiche environments. And some clients have been innovative with Laserfiche all on their own. Our last blog post featured the City of Santa Clarita. The city received funds from the federal government for pandemic-related rental aid. A Laserfiche form and Workflow launched the application process. The approach to achieve fair disbursement of funding was a smart one, so I highly suggest you check it out.
Having flexibility where and when staff needs to work has long been a hallmark of Laserfiche functionality. Working from home requires employees to perform certain tasks differently. Laserfiche makes it much easier to prevent business process interruptions. With the appropriate setup, employees can still securely access all of their documents from the Laserfiche repository while away from the office. They should also be able to fill out new forms and perform various tasks in the Laserfiche Forms inbox and participate in workflows. For capture, take photos of documents using the Laserfiche app on your smartphone or tablet and upload them to the repository that way. This is great for individual documents. To batch scan, you’ll need to use a scanner. Scan documents into Laserfiche using Laserfiche Scanning through Laserfiche Windows client or web client. You can also scan documents on to your computer and import them into Laserfiche using drag and drop
For collaboration, staff can collaborate on Microsoft Office documents directly within the web client using the Microsoft Office integration. Different users can perform actions on one document at the same time, and each user can see what the others are doing. This (in the ECM biz) is called co-authoring. This integration is available for Microsoft Office 365 or if your organization has a Microsoft Office Online Server implementation.
If you have any questions about how Laserfiche can support a hybrid environment please contact us.
