ACT govt chooses Insight(s) for imaging

First government site for UK-developed document management application.

Insight Technology has won a $250,000 contract from the ACT's Land Titles Office (LTO), a part of the Registrar General's Office, to supply a new imaging system.

The new system will be based on the Insight document management system from UK-based Insight Technologies. This is the first order for the document management system from the government sector in Australia.

The system is expected to be extended to support other activities under the auspices of the Registrar General's Office, including the office of Rental Bonds, the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages and the Registrar of Business Names and Associations.

The new Insight system will improve the management of the documents produced by the LTO by eliminating the need for physical storage, providing backup for TARDIS (LTO's automated land title register), minimising delays in processing and allowing multi-user and remote access.

The LTO currently houses in excess of 1.5 million documents on site, which have been manually accessed for the last 50 years. The contract includes imaging of existing documents. More than 600,000 documents will be imaged and stored directly in the new system and in the majority of cases original documents will be handed back to the customer.

NT-BASED SYSTEM

The implementation at the LTO is being handled by Canberra-based Insight Technology, a separate organisation that coincidentally shares the same name as the software vendor.

Insight Technology has engaged NSW-based Commercial Computer Centre to capture all paper-based images for the LTO.

Running on Windows NT, the solution brings together server and optical disk hardware from Hewlett-Packard and scanners from Canon.

Once imaged, documents can be sent electronically to customers via fax modems with no need for manual intervention.

The proposed solution for the LTO had to meet two key functional requirements, said Paul Flaherty, managing director of Insight Technology.

"The use of WORM optical disk technology and up to nine levels of security across users and documents ensures the system is extremely secure. Secondly, the system is useable by staff with a wide range of skills," he said.

"The design of the system not only ensures our solution meets the ease of use criterion but it has helped ensure a shorter, easier and lower cost implementation of the system."

Mr Flaherty said the staff have embraced the system, which has removed the tedious and laborious tasks of handling and managing old, large, leather-bound files.

General manager of Insight Technologies Asia Pacific, Sandra Clark, said "The software being implemented for the LTO was the only imaging suite built from the ground up as an integrated solution comprising document management, image management and workflow functions. As such the software scales easily from as few as five to as many as 10,000 seats.

"The biggest payback from the system is in the low time and cost of implementation which translates into faster time to market," Ms Clark said.