This rapid growth bogged down business license paperwork. The County decided on an enterprise solution to provide public access, as well as access records within various departments.

Clark County opted for a single vendor to provide the imaging and indexing software. The information systems department selected a countywide document imaging and workflow system from Image-X based in Santa Barbara, CA.

" We bought a huge site license for 2000 users " reports Linda Talley, the systems administrator for the project.

According to Image-X, Clark County is the first county government in the nation to embrace a single solution approach to document imaging and workflow. "Clark County is sharing scanned images on an enterprise basis- cross-country,cross-state and cross-country " according to Dr. Mohammed Shaikh, chairman and chief technologist of Image-X.

THE SOLUTION:

Image-X’s indexing system relies on existing applications to provide the image index database, thereby eliminating the need for additional keyword indexing. The enterprise storage and retrieval architecture allows distributed storage devices to be accessed over a wide area network – the same methodology that is used for the internet.

"We already have a tracking system in place that gives each paper a case number," explained Talley. " As images come through, the indexing software attaches itself to the relevant file."

Backfile conversion is not a viable option for the court. " We won’t be going back", said Talley. " That would take forever".

"We wanted to establish a ‘platform of choice’ to use consistently across the enterprise," Stephen Chapin director of information systems, said. " Image-X had a presence within our enterprise; our Business License Department embarked on an image and workflow system that is now in production. For this project, we selected Integris as our integrator and they recommended Image-X along with a few other products for the project."

The Recorder’s and District Attorney’s Office are in the process of re-engineering with Image-X’s imaging solution.

"Like all information technology projects, it is easy to be caught up in the technology and forget about the real problems that need to be solved," he added.

COMPONENTS USED:

The imaging and workflow client/server system uses nine servers running UNIX and OS/2 on a Token Ring Novell network. The software includes Image-X’s ImageMate and ImageFlow and Microsoft’s SQL server.