GovNews Blog
Our GovNews Blog focuses on indexing and redacting methods and news regarding identity theft, land records, court technology, manual data entry, workflow productivity, and more. If you are a court clerk, county attorney, register of deeds, or secretary of state, this blog may be beneficial.
I’m inspired by our customers’ passion and vision for increasing efficiency, securing sensitive information and improving customer experience with existing resources. Nearly every day I notice how our accomplishments are tied to our customers’ drive for innovation. I’m grateful for their willingness to share their stories and define their challenges.
Here are three key points that will continue to guide Extract’s focus in 2016.
Courts face this challenge daily - how do you put documents online and not violate the privacy of litigants? It’s no easy task. Court files are a literal treasure trove of private information. The Florida court system has struggled with this issue for a long time. Florida is somewhat unique in that it has two competing provisions in its constitution. The problem is not limited to Florida. Every court faces the same issues. This is the first of five blog posts setting forth lessons learned from Florida’s almost fifteen-year experience putting documents online. Later articles in the series include recommended best practices using policy and technology tools such as intelligent redaction software to balance privacy and access.
When making a business case for automated redaction software it's important to look at how much sensitive data needs to be redacted. Using a hunt-and-redact approach might appear workable in a low volume setting, but understanding how much sensitive data actually exists could reveal a significant cost savings for your organization. There are two key factors to understanding how much sensitive data you are dealing with: the percentage of documents that contain sensitive information and the amount of sensitive information in those documents. Knowing the percentage of documents that need to be processed with redaction[automated redaction software] software is the first step in understanding whether or not an automated redaction solution is right for you.When making a business case for automated redaction software it's important to look at how much sensitive data needs to be redacted. Using a hunt-and-redact approach might appear workable in a low volume setting, but understanding how much sensitive data actually exists could reveal a significant cost savings for your organization. There are two key factors to understanding how much sensitive data you are dealing with: the percentage of documents that contain sensitive information and the amount of sensitive information in those documents. Knowing the percentage of documents that need to be processed with redaction[automated redaction software] software is the first step in understanding whether or not an automated redaction solution is right for you.
n my first post in this series, I made the case for ECM. A successful court Electronic Content Management System (ECMS) includes lots more than its hardware, software (read more in the blog post in this series dedicated to technology), and network components. From the first serious consideration of implementing ECM, through planning and implementation itself, and continuing after the system becomes established, the court must devote substantial care, consideration, and effort to management of the People, the Politics, and the Governance of ECM.
When making the business case for Electronic Content management, rarely does Process Improvement rise to the top of the financial justifications. But any court manager who has implemented ECM with workflow will tell you that ECM Workflow has generated far and away the greatest financial savings the court has ever experienced. Although an ECM system without workflow can provide a court with some real benefits and savings, fully leveraging ECM requires taking advantage of the power of configurable automated workflow.
With robust ECM, that means being able to receive/acquire any file type from any physical location. Courts have to be able to capture documents filed from litigants, attorneys and other agencies such as prosecutors, law enforcement, service agencies, etc. The documents may be filed at the court, received through standard mail, emailed or e-filed. Non-digital objects - paper documents - must be converted to digital objects. Paper documents are typically captured into the ECM through scanning. They arrive in various different forms.
While court managers know that court records management "Best Practices" include implementing Electronic Content Management (ECM), that hardly answers the question of how to leverage ECM to meet a particular court's needs in ways that will result in faster, more efficient, and higher quality court management.
If you have lived on this earth for more than a couple of decades, you do not have to look back very far to realize all of the conveniences technology has brought to our everyday lives. When it comes to the subject of online court records however, technology it seems has made things much more complicated. Gone are the days of “practical obscurity” when a trip to the courthouse to view a paper file inherently limited access to information and court staff had control over who was looking at records and for what purpose.
I attended my fifth Court Technology Conference (CTC) in Minneapolis, MN this past week. The educational track that resonated with me was How IT Can Design and Deliver Solutions to Create a High Performance Court. Here is a quote from the session description that really sums up the state of technology in the courts:
When deciding on how to proceed with a document redaction project often times the most important question an organization needs to answer is: “Should we do this with internal resources or pay experts to do it for us?” This can be a complicated question to answer but most organizations should be able to answer it by weighing the pros and cons of each with three factors in mind. The three factors that need to be considered are document origin (historical backfile or day-forward), volume (how many documents?) and redaction software (automated redaction or seek-and-redact). Of those three factors, document origin is the most import to consider first.
Mark Manocelli, St. Louis County Public Records & Property Valuation Director, was blessed with a great deal of vision which allowed him to envision how to make e-recording a reality and what steps were required. He also obtains leadership, public speaking skills and confidence to make a project of this size a success. This, and some good luck along the way, allowed Manocelli to lead a group of hard working, passionate people from throughout the country that believed they could be successful in creating the e-recording infrastructure and XML data standards.
In this interview with Jeff Thigpen, he expresses how his office continually assess business practices based on available technology to serve customers effectively and efficiently. They replaced a 23-year-old computer system; implemented e-recording; redacted social security numbers and personal information; created an online marriage application and are implementing a program for online requests for birth, death, and marriage certificates.
As discussed in our last blog post, courts must consider a variety of scenarios when devising a strategy that balances access to court documents and protection of personal identification data when making court documents available online. There are tools available to courts to help strategically manage the complexities involved. For example, case and document security levels in your case management system (CMS) can be used to protect data in those cases and documents that by law are restricted, sealed or otherwise confidential.
