Laserfiche: At the Helm of Government Tech Innovation

As 4,000 attendees from over 30 countries gathered in the Long Beach Convention Center, the new president of Laserfiche, Karl Chan, and the company’s CEO, Chris Wacker took center stage. It was Laserfiche’s annual Empower Conference as attendees expected to hear about new tools and trends, and learn how to build more digitally driven connected and intelligent enterprises. On the stage, Chan mentions, “Digital transformation is no longer an option; it’s a necessity for organizations to keep pace with customer and employee expectations. Laserfiche provides a framework for the visionary digital initiatives that go beyond IT, enable growth and innovation, and transform lives.”— setting the tone of the annual event for the viewers.

From the very beginning, Laserfiche has been a huge advocate of creating a customer-centric approach to help the clients in mitigating their transitioning predicaments. Wacker recalls, “In 1987, Honda was facing a product liability suit for its motorcycles, and asked Nien-Ling to develop a program to digitize thousands of papers related to the litigation and make them searchable. That was the genesis of Laserfiche.” The company started as a very efficient and high-performance alternative to the file cabinet and is today focused on offering its product via the cloud, negating the need for physical infrastructures such as servers or storage devices. “Using the cloud also allows clients to more quickly and easily upgrade their software, and allows them to pay for the service every month rather than out of an annual capital budget,” adds Chan.

Built in an open architecture, non-proprietary format, the company’s content management, and business processing software empowers state and local governments to maximize public benefits with civic innovation. While Laserfiche’s client base includes many reputed public entities, Chris informs that the client he is most proud to have is the City of Long Beach. While Laserfiche has been working with the city government for about a decade, the city council’s August 21 decision to approve a new contract with the company is significantly expanding that partnership. He mentions, “What we’ll do for them is to automate all of the city’s processes, which heretofore have been manual. For example, we’ll build forms for them which they’ll put on their website and allow them to remove the paper from that process entirely. Not only will it make it more efficient and faster, but it will also eliminate any data entry errors from paper into a computer.

We are very proud of that and excited about what we can do for the city.”

A growing number of state and local governments are using Laserfiche’s document management software with business process automation technology to eliminate many of the manual tasks associated with FOIL requests. Records managers who used to spend days or weeks on these administrative tasks—entering data, ensuring reviews, obtaining approvals from attorneys, redacting sensitive and private information and sending email updates—can now deliver responses on deadline and spend more time on other services, leading to a better relationship with the public. “Government agencies around the world face increasing pressure to provide more services to growing populations with fewer resources,” states Chan. “By leveraging our technology to eliminate paper and automate business processes, Government organizations are models of modern service delivery.”

When it comes to the government sector, Laserfiche provides its solutions to three different areas— federal, state and local, and law enforcement agencies. On the federal side, the company enables its clients to collaborate on content, route it for review and approval, and publish it to secure web portals by leveraging business process automation. They can save time by sharing, searching and retrieving information across multiple agency locations and repositories. The solution also allows them to provide and process information in a safer, faster and more cost-effective manner than ever before. The federal government is also empowered to securely capture, view and act upon mission-critical content, and save resources and scale up by deploying without on-premises infrastructure—simplifying system management and disaster recovery. They can also protect privacy and confidentiality with SSL/ TSL encryption and strict access controls for unstructured data. The federal government can also provide agency staff with secure, controlled access to centralized repositories from anywhere in the world with secure Single Sign-On, SHA- 256 encryption, and multi-factor authentication through Laserfiche’s comprehensive solution.

For the local and state government, Laserfiche supports compliance with regulatory mandates like GDPR, CJIS, FOIA, and HIPAA. Through the company’s document repository solution, they can apply granular controls and protect unstructured data with SSL/TLS encryption and streamline vendor management and mitigate third party application risk.

Further, Laserfiche also empowers digital citizens through its solutions by providing them with robust, digital connections to government services and public information, and protecting their Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and other sensitive information. The company ensures that their solutions are not subjected to more prominent agencies and even the smaller ones aren’t left behind in the digital transformation. Lastly, Laserfiche also enables law enforcement agencies to create a central hub for law enforcement records. They can link scanned documents, photographs and other items with CAD-RMS case files, and provide officers with access to records from their squad cars. In addition, Laserfiche’s document management solution also enable police officers to submit police reports, pre-trial motions and other documents electronically such that they can maintain different levels of security for each type of document within a case file. The solution also improves legislative transparency as it delivers high-quality records to staff and the public with ease. This enables the citizens to view court opinions, agenda items on demand, publish an online public record complete with audio, video and supporting documents, and also provide judges with real-time documentation in their chambers to perform remote video arraignments. In an instance, the Justice Lab, a project of the Long Beach Innovation Team, has partnered with Laserfiche to expand the use of this technology to assist police officers. For example, if a domestic violence call comes in, officers can pull up a map indicating prior cases of domestic violence in the area and who was involved.

"We are an intellectual capital company: intellectual capital is our stock and trade"

The company has been on an exponential growth record and to attract more employees to join the team, Laserfiche has cultivated a company culture with employee-centric perks. “It’s in our DNA. We are an intellectual capital company: intellectual capital is our stock and trade. So, we like to keep our fingers on the pulse of everyone in the company, and provide them the best possible experience that we’re capable of,” mentions Chan. As Laserfiche grows in Long Beach, it continues to expand community outreach. Every last Thursday of the month, employees volunteer at the Long Beach Rescue Mission, according to Hall. Employees also participate in monthly beach cleanups. The firm supports many nonprofits, including the local chapters of the Boys & Girls Club, the YMCA, the Boy Scouts, and Habitat for Humanity. Overall, Chan said he is excited about what the future holds for Laserfiche in Long Beach. He concludes, “We believe the management and elected officials in the city are very dynamic and they have a vision and, in addition to that, they are acting upon that vision; we appreciate the leadership that they provide. I think it will just create more opportunity for us.”