Please note that these materials are provided for historical purposes only. The information presented is out of date and may be neither accurate nor useful. External hyperlinks may no longer be valid.
CHAPTER SIX
Summary of Imaging Sites
Up to this point, the report has covered imaging as it is now and as it is likely to be in the future in a generic treatment that could apply to any application. Now we turn to imaging in specific sites.
In preparing this report, we visited six imaging sites--three court sites, two sites in the executive branch of state government, and a corporate site. We selected these sites to show a variety of court imaging applications as well as several examples of how imaging is used in other branches of government and in industry. We concentrated on sites that were roughly equivalent to courts in size and to which courts could relate, and this eliminated massive imaging operations such as those at some insurance companies and federal agencies.
The six sites visited were the Riverside County Consolidated Superior/Municipal Courts, Orange County Jury Commissioner’s Office, Orange County Central Municipal Court, Delaware Secretary of State Division of Corporations, CSX Corporation, and Virginia Retirement System.
At each of these sites, while imaging performs the basic functions of capturing, storing, retrieving, displaying, processing, distributing, and managing documents, it performs them in different ways and to different degrees. The key point is this: imaging satisfies the need at each site.
While the purpose of this report is not to evaluate the sites, each has attributes that are exemplary. When considered as a composite, they illustrate most of the imaging capabilities and considerations discussed throughout the report.
- The Riverside County Consolidated Superior/Municipal Courts have (1) open architecture that allows the imaging system to work with various PCs and networks and (2) strong supervision of the imaging section that enhances system efficiency and data accuracy.
- The Orange County Jury Commissioner’s Office (1) avoids key entry by using OCR to convert the information in boxes on juror questionnaires to data and to enter it into the jury case processing system and (2) has strong technical support for its imaging project.
- The Orange County Central Municipal Court imaging system functions as a member of an integrated information system that has enabled the municipal court to give the public "one-stop shopping" at a single location instead of passing a person around to several clerks for different types of service.
- The Delaware Secretary of State Division of Corporations imaging system (1) allows input by either remote scanning, local scanning, or fax; (2) uses a sophisticated workflow formula to assign workers to requests based on a worker’s capability and a request’s priority; and (3) superimposes text in blank spaces on forms that contain signatures, seals, letterheads, and other inscriptions to produce excellent-quality official documents.
- CSX decided to eschew an expensive turnkey imaging system and form a development team comprised of its technical staff and vendor personnel, and this approach (1) gave CSX the best of all worlds by combining CSX staff who knew how the company applied technology with the vendors who knew imaging, computers, and networks; (2) saved CSX over $1.5 million because management knew exactly what equipment was needed and could order new equipment only to supplement what already was installed; and (3) gave CSX direct project involvement and customized software.
- The Virginia Retirement System imaging is simply a good overall system that is right for that organization because it (1) needs to distribute specific types of documents to the workstations that process those document types; (2) has several operators working on a document concurrently; (3) needs to integrate imaging, data, and text; (4) needs to group information received over many years; and (5) needs to locate files and information rapidly.
The table given below will help you identify which imaging characteristics are highlighted in each of the six site-visit write-ups. The emphasis is on major features such as those noted above as exemplary, those that may be unusual, and those that illustrate major directions for the future covered earlier in this report. Inclusion of a feature for a particular site indicates the feature is highlighted in the write-up for that site; it does not necessarily imply the feature is absent from the other sites.
The court site visits to the Riverside County Consolidated Superior/Municipal Courts, Orange County Jury Commissioner’s Office, and Orange County Central Municipal Court are covered in the next chapter. Appendix A consists of reports of the Delaware Secretary of State Division of Corporations, CSX, and Virginia Retirement System site visits.
While the three court sites are presented together in an integrated manner, the three non-court sites are covered in separate reports. In each instance, the presentations consist of
- A Summary of imaging at the site(s),
- A brief Enterprise Description of the environment at the site(s) in which imaging is used,
- A description of the main characteristics of the
site’s Imaging Application that
- Gives an overview of the background, imaging functions, and equipment and software used for imaging and related systems;
- Summarizes the planning, implementation, and management used in the imaging project;
- Summarizes the operations and maintenance of the imaging system;
- Gives the advantages and disadvantages of imaging from the site’s perspective; and
- Summarizes future plans.
- A Detailed System Description of how the site(s) performs imaging.
- A summary of the Conclusions derived from the site visit(s).
| Feature | Riverside County Courts |
Orange County Jury |
Orange County Municipal Court |
Delaware Division of Corporations |
CSX | Virginia Retirement System |
| Local scan input | X | X | X | X | X | |
| Remote scan input | X | |||||
| Fax input | X | X | X | |||
| Document import | X | |||||
| OCR | X | |||||
| Integrated image/film index | X | |||||
| LAN or client server | X | X | X | X | X | |
| Enterprise network | X | X | X | X | ||
| Enterprise integration | X | X | ||||
| Workflow | X | X | ||||
| Open architecture | X | |||||
| Compound document | X | |||||
| Strong technical support | X | X | X | X | X | X |
| Strong development & implementation strategy |
X | X |