Kentucky Governor's Office for Technology

Xerox Assists Vital Information Flow to Executive Branch

"Kentucky is boldly moving forward."
The Kentucky Governor's Office for Technology (GOT) reflects Governor Paul E. Patton's vision and policy directives to change the way the state does business, including distributing and effectively using information. Under the direction of the Chief Information Officer, Aldona Valicenti, the GOT serves as the state's Information Technology provider and consults for 12 cabinets and over 120 boards, commissions, and departments.

The GOT's core mission is to collaborate closely with agencies to develop and maintain a statewide architecture for effective content management throughout the Executive branch. The GOT's responsibilities include establishing hardware, software, and telecommunications standards, maintaining agencies email servers, and assisting and advising whenever technical issues arise.

The Content Management Challenge

The GOT saw an opportunity to foster the development of "communities of practice" and encourage collaboration and communication throughout the state.
The GOT enterprise spans multiple locations and operating platforms, resulting in disparate information sources. Sharing resources was problematic because key information such as billing transactions and monthly reports, as well as highly confidential information, was stored on a mainframe with proprietary security and authorization codes. Easy access to routine information was not possible, causing numerous information bottlenecks. If a GOT customer agency had a question about a bill, there was no way for customer service representatives to access the statement to answer the question.

Consequently, the GOT over-relied on the department's website to share information. But that caused problems because it was not secure and risked confidentiality. Additionally as content changed, the document creator would have to give it to the Webmaster to manage re-posting it. With hundreds of document creators, it was a challenging task to keep the documents on the Web current.

If paper documents needed to be shared internally, copies were made and distributed through the mail - a process that was both slow and expensive.

The Kentucky Governor's Office of Technology Benefits

Because of its comprehensive feature set and ease of use, DocuShare's GOT content collections, including Strategic Planning, Administration, and Governance, have become strategic information resources for the Executive branch.
DocuShare allows full-text searches across multiple servers, giving GOT employees and contractors critical and valuable information from anywhere at anytime. Document collaboration is now possible at participants' convenience or in real time. DocuShare's Version Control feature ensures the most recent version of a document is visible, while archiving older versions for reference. DocuShare's Subscription feature automatically e-mails notification of new content to appropriate collaborators.

DocuShare has clearly made quite an impact on the GOT workflow. There are over 600 DocuShare users within the GOT and 300 external users. According to Charles Robb, Director of IT Consulting Services for the Division of Planning and Architecture, "DocuShare is so simple to learn that people I never expected to try are using it. Everyone is embracing the technology."

Robb is so impressed with the Xerox Content Management Solution that he is an advocate to other government agencies. But he is most impressed with how GOT has improved its service to the Kentucky Executive branch. "We started to undergo a controlled change about two years ago. Xerox has really helped us keep our momentum."