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El Paso County, Colorado
Overview
El Paso County lies in east central Colorado is home to over 575,000 citizens and one of the largest, fastest growing counties in the State.
Challenge
El Paso County had been in the process of revamping its IT infrastructure to evolve its business into a standards environment. The county’s philosophy was to implement new and improved systems that would be standard platforms across the county and integrated together in order to be accessed by every employee in every department from their desktop. Part of this plan is to tie the county's disparate systems together into one Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to make sure it could reach its ultimate goal of providing great service and flexibility to its citizens and the County.
With over 2000 employees, the county has been running its operations manually and many of its critical processes have become inefficient and unproductive. These manual processes lacked a means for employees to track status and manage critical information.
One piece of the county’s SOA puzzle is Business Process Management (BPM) technology. The county reviewed a variety of solutions and vendors to help define, automate, and transform these inefficient processes, and ultimately selected Metastorm BPM™ to begin establishing a business process-oriented framework for its SOA strategy. The Metastorm solution is now serving as the county’s standard platform for business process improvement.
The first service-enabled process that El Paso is deploying as part of its path to a complete service-oriented architecture is a very cumbersome, frustrating process – the Agenda Management process. This process is used by the Board of County Commissioners (BoCC) to review and approve items submitted by county departments and offices for its citizens and determine what will be discussed during its board committee meetings that are held bi-weekly.
The process has been managed using paper which led to a lack of control and insight into where things were in the approval process. The process was labor and time intensive, and the inefficiencies in the process often times became very costly to the county especially when dealing with critical contract approvals.
By selecting Metastorm as the BPM standard across the county, El Paso will be able to automate endless manual processes and further streamline its operations, while helping to create a business-driven roadmap for achieving its SOA strategy.
Solution
By automating its Agenda Management process using Metastorm BPM, the county will be able to digitize and aggregate all the backup data from the various departments at the commissioners’ offices and then enable each of the users to have insight into where these items are in the process and when they are approved to go on the BoCC agenda.
Metastorm is working with its partner, the Normandy Group, a business process management solutions provider, to develop and implement the solution. Metastorm was selected because of its scalability, ease of use, simulation capabilities, best value and relationship with Microsoft.
The automation is currently underway and expects to be live by January 2007. In order to complete the project, the process will be integrated with the county’s document management provider Hummingbird (now Open Text) and tied with all of its other electronic content through web services.
With Metastorm BPM all users involved in the agenda management process are connected and automatically notified when items (with backup) need to be reviewed so that there is collective accountability for the overall process.
The county sees its relationship with Metastorm as very long term as they plan to continue to leverage the software and continuously automate manual processes. El Paso County has positioned Metastorm BPM at the core of its SOA plan and will be helping the county realize more business value from service enablement.
Next up on the BPM/SOA agenda is automating the county’s Permitting process – the procedure that manages requests for approval from developers for construction permits. Currently a very cumbersome process, the county is expecting to reduce processing times by streamlining procedures, integrating Metastorm BPM with its GIS system, and ultimately making it pay off for county developers who pay fees for this service.
Expected Results
Using Metastorm BPM, El Paso County is changing the way it manages processes to help the county become more cost effective and productive across the organization and help meet critical goals and objectives.
By increasing operational efficiency, the county will also be able to handle the growth of the county in the future without having to add resources – a significant financial payoff resulting over time.
El Paso County has plans to expand its use of Metastorm BPM to automate additional key processes including the department of transportation, finance, environmental services, to help with developing a citizen and contractor portal, and to help with Government Paper Reduction Act (GPRA) compliance. The software will continue to play an active role as the process service provider in the county’s SOA helping them effectively align IT initiatives with the strategic goals of the business.
El Paso County’s CIO states that Metastorm is a partner for life and the software will eventually encompass 90 percent of the county’s use and be in production long after he retires!
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