(L-R) John Parker, Bloomington; Dennis Carlson, Anoka-Hennepin; Betty Schweizer, TIES; Georgia Kedrowski, Anoka-Hennepin; Tom Clemens, TIES; Helmut Porcher, TIES; Cindie Teeling, Bloomington; Don Mammenga, TIES; Sandy Gaulke, ISD 287; Bryan Hennekens, Columbia Heights.

The iContent document management project has received the Local Government Innovations Award for Efficiency and Cost Effectiveness from the Humphrey Institute’s Public and Nonprofit Leadership Center. This was a collaborative effort between TIES and eight member school districts, including Anoka-Hennepin, Bloomington, Columbia Heights, Intermediate School District 287, Mahtomedi, Osseo, Richfield and St. Francis. The project’s aim was to solve the high cost and difficult retrieval of stored documents. Paper is taking over school districts -- student transcripts, special education plans, student portfolios, board packets, contracts, building plans and lots, purchase orders, requisitions, invoices and packing slips, all files for current, terminated and retired employees, and more. District staff time and building spaces are filling up with the growing accumulation of paper and are struggling to meet the continued demands of government retention mandates.

By working together, eight Minnesota districts with TIES are overcoming this document storage challenge by sharing an electronic records management system by Oracle. A critical part of this project was to develop a shared record index and implement it across all districts rather than each district recreating their own separate index. With a wide variety of millions of documents involved, indexing is a complicated task but very important for easy document retrieval. Also, by sharing, the participating districts were able to purchase a much more robust and feature-rich system than any single district could afford on its own.

The result has been improved customer service with instant retrieval of documents for families and districts all done in drastically reduced staff time to create and store electronic records.

“We are delighted the project has received this recognition,” said Betty Schweizer, TIES executive director. “This project not only resulted in the best solution for districts, but it also exemplifies our mission to promote collaboration, provide critical operational technology and conduct research and development on behalf of our members.”

The award, made by the Leadership Center in collaboration with the Association of Minnesota Counties, the League of Minnesota Cities and the Minnesota School Boards Association, recognizes cities, counties, and schools that have used inventive practices to improve local services.

The award was presented at a ceremony on April 21, 2008, at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, 301 19th Ave. S., Minneapolis.

iContent project participants
Georgia Kedrowski, Anoka-Hennepin
Patrick Plant, Anoka-Hennepin
John Parker, Bloomington
Cindie Teeling, Bloomington
Bryan Hennekens, Columbia Heights
Sandy Gaulke, ISD 287
David Anderson, ISD 287
Lynda Counihan, Mahtomedi
Chris Brooks, Osseo
Judy McDonald, Osseo
Kay Korupp, Osseo
Cindy Brown, Osseo
Ben Clifton, Osseo Ed Fairbairn, Richfield
Lynn Opatz, Richfield
Craig Holje, Richfield
Marc Johnson, St. Francis
Helmut Porcher, TIES
Don Mammenga, TIES
Tom Clemens, TIES