Voter Registrars Association of Georgia Conference

Last week I attended the annual conference for the Voter Registrars Association of Georgia. This is the group of government officials who ensure that you get every chance to vote and that your vote counts. They are dedicated officials from 159 counties who spend their time trying to provide a better voting experience, striving to meet the ever changing voting laws, dealing with demanding candidates, dealing with razor thin budgets from county commissioners, complying to state elections regulations, dealing with special interest groups concerned about voter fraud, and of course dealing with the ever friendly voting public. Some think that those in the elections office only work during an election. I am here to tell you that they never stop working.

This year’s big topics included redistricting in the counties and preparing for next year’s presidential election. Everyone agreed that next year’s elections will be a challenge. They all believe that the voter turnout will increase over past presidential elections. The challenge for most will be how to handle this increased voter turnout with a decreased budget and less resources. With fewer resources, funding to pay the temporary workers needed to process early voting and absentee voting becomes harder to find. This fact has elections officials taking a serious look at how technology could help streamline and quicken the steps to process voters.

One particular solution at the conference that drew high interest was a way to speed up the early voting process. The product, called EasyVote, is used to speed up the application process for early voting. When a voter in Georgia wants to vote early they must fill out an application before they are issued their ballot card. This is traditionally an area that bogs down the process with a voter needing help to fill out the application or the poll worker not being able to read the voters handwriting. EasyVote speeds up the process by having the voter give their drivers license to the poll worker to run through a hand held scanner that reads the information off the license and automatically fills out the information on the application for the voter. All the voter needs to do is sign it. This removes the hassle from the voter and since the application is electronically filled out, the poll worker has no issue in reading it. The result is a happier voter, a less frustrated poll worker, and a voting line that moves quicker. For the election director there are also reporting capabilities built into EasyVote that enables them to quickly produce information for candidates or the state election office.

With technology products like EasyVote and others, what was traditionally very manual and people oriented in elections, is now moving towards automation and experiencing what the benefits of integrating technology into their work processes can do. This is Sivad’s mission, finding the manual bottlenecks that slow the work process, decrease employee productivity and become very costly and offer the technology solutions to fix them. I will still be the first to say that technology cannot replace people, but technology can be strategically placed to assist people in better performing their jobs. Especially in today’s budget strapped economy we all need ways to better perform our jobs. We might lose people to layoffs, attrition and other reasons, but we never lose the volume of work. We still have to find ways to offer the service our customers expect.

I encourage any industry or job function that has not looked at how technology can assist them, to see if there are solutions out there that can save time and money. While technology cannot solve every problem, I have seen enough times to know that it can make a difference. The key is to understand how your business runs and where it falls short. This is your starting place to see if the right technology can make a difference. Good luck!

Photo by Sarae via Flickr

One Government Official Who Gets It

I participated in an interesting radio interview the other day with Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brian Kemp. The goal of the interview was to discuss with Secretary Kemp the role technology plays in Government, especially the Elections Office. For Sivad Business Solutions, the Elections Office has been a specific area where we have seen success in offering solutions to automate their processes. As the interview continued Secretary Kemp discussed the need for Government to be more competitive. That was very refreshing to hear. Many of us have experienced horror stories of an inefficient Government; getting business licenses, driver’s licenses, property zoning, etc. We’ve all experienced long lines, uncaring employees and endless miles of red tape. As an experienced small business owner, Secretary Kemp campaigned on making changes for efficiency in Government. Soon after Secretary Kemp entered office he set up a “cut red tape” website to solicit Georgia Business owners to offer suggestions that would make interfacing with his department easier and faster. His goal is to quickly get them what they need, and then get out of their way. His point is that if business needs to be efficient and competitive in order to survive, then why shouldn’t Government be held to the same standards? This was critical as his department faced a 27% budget cut and the consolidation of departments. Secretary Kemp’s next step was to add a Chief Innovation Officer to find ways that technology can be implemented to make Government more competitive. He understands, as I do, that you cannot completely take people out of processes, but by integrating technology into their daily jobs you can make them more productive and make their jobs more satisfying. An efficient Government and happy Government employees will benefit us all. I continue to see how technology can assist us in every facet of our working lives and it is obvious to me that Secretary Kemp also sees this value. I can only hope that other Government officials will take the same stance that Secretary Kemp has, and make County, State and Federal Government hold to the same operating standards as we do in the business sector.

Has Your Company Growth Stalled?

It is a common tale. In the past, a business performs well. But time passes, and that growth trend stalls. Trust us when we tell you, there is usually a cause. There are bottlenecks in your business process that are slowing you down!

Data Management + Better Decision Making

Time is wasted when the same data is entered multiple times…

More time is wasted when more than two people have to handle the same piece of paper…

Finally, if you do not have easy + quick access to this data when you need to make important organizational decisions, you are at a disadvantage…

If any of these bottlenecks sound familiar, you need to improve your intern business process…

SIVAD…Making Elections More Accurate

Sivad’s Ron Davis talks about how we can improve efficiency and process in county government:

Sivad knows that county governments are asked to provide more and better services…with fewer staff and smaller budgets. County election offices are just one area where we can be of service…

How To Start Finding Your Organization’s Bottlenecks

Ron Davis riffs on how to begin the arduous process of finding the bottlenecks that are slowing down your organization:

The keys to identifying the bottlenecks?

1. Start small.

2. Start with identifying just one broken process, not the whole organization at once.

3. Talk to your people. Don’t just assume.

4. Study and understand every detail of your day-to-day administration. Most executives don’t know these details.

5. When your people say “this is the way we’ve always done it” – treat this as code to better understand if this process is broken.

Once you start, it becomes easier to identify other broken down processes. And finally, create a culture where people are rewarded for suggesting ways to make business processes more efficient.

This will go a long way to making your organization better, faster, more efficient, and more profitable!

How us Technology People Should be Treating Customers

After my last blog post on finding a trusted advisor, I ran across the blog I have linked below. This was posted from a company called, Ultimus, and discussed how sales representatives from software technology companies treat and should treat customers. The writer of the blog discussed how we need to communicate differently to our customers by not using the technology lingo that only the people in our office understand. I thought this was a good addition to my previous post and wanted to share it with you.

Ultimus Blog Post – BPM…Huh?

1600 CIO’s can’t be wrong

I recently read a press release from the IT research analyst company Gartner. They discussed a study of 1600 CIO’s who were asked about 2010 IT budgets, technology priorities and business priorities. While the response on budgets was flat at best, I thought their business priorities echoed what I have been seeing in the marketplace. The top three business priorities were as follows:

1. Business Process Improvement
2. Reducing Enterprise Costs
3. Increasing the use of Information and Analytics

This validates what my customers are telling me. Executives are tired of hearing their employees say “Well this is how we have always done it”. Today’s technology is too flexible, affordable, and easy to use. There is no reason why any company should not take a serious look at how technology can reduce manual processes and duplications of effort and increase employee productivity.

If you haven’t looked at technology because you don’t know where to start, I understand. There is a vast amount of technology products and vendors available to the marketplace. Each one spins their technology to be the best. While the last thing you want is to meet with salespeople every day who will bring in nice brochures of their products, you do want to find someone who understands the technology landscape. This person, which I call the “trusted advisor”, will discuss your problems and educate you on types of technology to solve them before they ever drill into a specific product.

Technology has become a driving force for competing and surviving in any industry. If you haven’t look how it can change your day-to-day business, its time that you do. So go find your trusted advisor to lead you down the greater productivity path. Happy hunting!

I have linked to the Gartner press release for anyone interested in reading it.

Gartner EXP Worldwide Survey of Nearly 1,600 CIOs Shows IT Budgets in 2010 to be at 2005 Levels

Photo from Minasodaboy on Flickr

Looking at Technology in a New Way

It has been a busy few weeks for Sivad. We are in the middle of new customer implementations with a few more that need to be scheduled. It is a good sign to see companies who realize that even in a down economy spending money on new technology solutions is a good investment.

It’s no different for us at Sivad. We strive to keep our costs down and look to implement the right technology solutions to achieve our goals. One area that we have improved is the digital storage and access of documents. While this might be a basic function, we have found a unique way to access any document that will give us the needed knowledge to make fast, intelligent decisions.

While having archival of old documents is important, at Sivad our biggest concern is more our day-to-day business and market intelligence. We want to know what is going on with our market, our customers, our prospects, our competitors, and technology in general. In the past if we found an interesting article on the internet it would get printed out, stuck in a folder with good intentions of reading it, but in reality it was likely never to be seen again. That has all changed now. We took a product from one of our vendors, aXs Info, and used it in a way that best benefited us. Along with a scanning interface, we have the ability on the fly to print or drag documents directly into their system. This can be web pages or internet articles, emails, Microsoft Office documents, videos or just about any other document. There is a very easy indexing process and all the documents are run through a process that saves all the text in order to search on it later (I call this our internal Google search). This process of quickly saving documents is great, but best part is being able to find what we’re looking for, with a few keystrokes.

We don’t use their supplied searching interface, instead we use an option they offer called “the integrator”. This makes any application that we’re using, the searching interface. For example, I could be reading an email and see something that I need to react to, but before I do I want to know if I have any more information on the subject. To find out, I will highlight a word in the email and select a pre-determined “hotkey”. The aXs Info system will search all saved documents and any that matches that highlighted word will appear in a search results box. I select the document I am interested in seeing and it opens right there without leaving my email. I can perform this same search in web pages, in Word documents, accounting applications and just about any other application you can think of.

This has been a somewhat non-traditional way to use this application, but we have realized for our needs this way offers the most benefits. That’s a good point to keep in mind when using a new technology, it might be marketed for one use, but once it is understood it can be used for something else. I have seen many an executive who has the vision to reconfigure it, to ensure the most value for their company. I would encourage you to try to do the same with your present installed technology solutions.

Exploring the Sivad Framework

One of the most common questions we get is, “So what exactly does Sivad do?” We will explain the services we offer and for those who’ve seen or used services similar to ours, they get it. For others though, it’s not so clear. It was on one of these occasions that I decided to explain it visually and the light bulb went on in the person asking. Since that time we always use what I call the “Sivad Business Solutions Framework” to describe what we do, and how it can make a company more productive and profitable. Recently I had someone film this visual model in a meeting so that it could be used to answer this question in the future. I’ve just added it to my latest blog post and we’ll soon be adding it to our website. I’d love it if you’d take a few minutes to watch it and let me know what you think.