The man who helped the Ugandan government modernise its document management

IF GARY AGIRA`S STORY were a movie, the story would be a harrowing drama of a lone Ugandan IT systems analyst navigating endless government bureaucracy, dealing with workers who are resistant to change, and taking on a daunting national registry and warehouse overflowing with 34 million government documents just begging to be brought into an orderly digital world.

It`d be a charmingly idiosyncratic story, but still a universal one: document management as a metaphor for progress, with Agira`s unwavering belief in the power of technology as he moves a nation and a workforce into the digital age.

But it isn`t a movie. The real Gary Agira is the IT systems analyst for Uganda`s Privatisation and Utility Sector Reform Project (PUSRP). The PUSRP is the organisation under the Ministry of Finance and Planning charged with the epic task of overhauling the way the African nation archives, stores and actually works with records to support the divestiture and reform of 42 public enterprises. It`s all part of an initiative to move Uganda`s economy forward.

THE MISSION

On paper, the PUSRP`s mission is simple: to provide an information management infrastructure to support improved commercial and utility services through divesting and restructuring public enterprises like telecoms, energy, water and transport by increasing private sector participation.

But the paper itself that needed to be archived and managed? That`s what Agira referred to as "the horror of the heaps".

The national registry overflowed with 10 million documents, which, owing to an inconsistent filing system, led to information silos and misplaced documents. Then there was the massive national warehouse, located 20 minutes away from the government offices. "That`s 20 minutes on our roads," Agira laughs. "These aren`t four-lane highways." There, another 24 million documents were precariously housed, subject to water from burst pipes, exposure, and "vermin damage". Yes, rats were eating the paper.

Besides protecting critical information from damage, Agira faced other challenges. Documents were often leaked to the press, which brought up concerns. And with divestiture would come the need to strengthen the regulatory framework of newly privatised enterprises, as well as financial oversight of public enterprise. In short, there was a need for transparent records management, even if no one knew that`s what it was called yet.

THE SOLUTION

Agira lobbied his administrators with pictures of workers searching for records in the national warehouse, protected by makeshift hazmat suits. Finally, after a few false starts, he secured funding for the much-needed system and, by 2005, the search was on for the right system. Agira carefully assembled a team, including government sceptics, as he puts it, "to experience document management as a group. I realised we had to have executive buy-in from the start. People at the top had to own this as much as we did."

"There was a lack of know-how of modern document management techniques," Agira adds. Librarians held a monopoly on information. Representatives from the national government viewed document management as a librarian`s task and not a part of business processes. "There was a lack of collective ownership," he adds. And many workers were intimidated by technology, fearing it would render their jobs obsolete  a concern in a nation where many workers serve as their families` sole support.

Agira and his team looked at half a dozen options and agreed on Laserfiche as the solution. He set up a scanning room and a server, and soon newly-trained clerks began scanning in the 10 million documents in the national registry. The benefits were as obvious as they were various. Master files were created to eliminate duplication, lost documents and information silos, security could be tracked and managed using Audit Trail, and, in a country with molasses-slow internet capabilities, Web access made remote retrieval available, which was in itself revolutionary. "FTP isn`t available to us," Agira explains. "When we hit send, we can go do something else and come back later and it`ll still be transmitting."

There were unexpected benefits as well: because Laserfiche stores scanned documents as single page TIFFs, document storage only used a third of the tetrabytes Agira had allotted. But it`s been the intangibles he shift in workers` attitudes, morale and confidence hat he`s most impressed by. Agira credits that enthusiasm to what he jokingly calls Laserfiche`s "idiot-proof" interface. "In just two hours of training, people are comfortable using the system," he says.

Hobey Echlin is a writer/researcher in the Laserfiche Marketing department and is active in the Laserfiche Luminaries program.



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