Access & Hearing Requests at WSDOT— ILINX Enables Rapid Implementation

Richard Norrell, Washington State Department of Transportation

The staff of the WSDOT Access & Hearing office approached the ECM team to discuss a possible solution for a paper based process they had where external customers would submit documents to them requesting access to WSDOT property. The Access & Hearing staff needed a way to control and track these requests and the paper process was just not able to meet their needs any longer. The ECM engineers met with the business to go over their specifications and discuss possible solutions for the Access & Hearing office.

ILINX Capture Workflow flowchart

Utilizing a blended ILINX Capture, ILINX Content Store, and the WSDOT ECM Portal, a solution was provided that not only meets their immediate needs but also allows them to comply with future requirements such as audit, public disclosure, and retention management requirements.

In this solution, users from various offices throughout WSDOT will be able to submit their documents using the drag-and-drop features of the ILINX Capture client. Once documents are submitted an email is sent to the Access & Hearing office, notifying them of the submission.

From there the Access & Hearing staff will index the documents and forward them to the staff responsible for reviewing and providing the Approval or Denial of the request.

Once final determination is made the workflow will provide notification to the office requesting the access and also release the documents where they will then be available to WSDOT staff and trusted partners.

One of the additional challenges for this solution arises when the request for Access relates to a project that does not yet exist. The Access & Hearing administrators needed a way to create the necessary project related information. For this a simple administration panel was built in the WSDOT ECM Portal.

Project Admin Panel

This panel will keep track of all current and previous projects that have been submitted to the Access & Hearing office. The data created with this project is used as a lookup in the ILINX Capture process to ensure the documents are associated with the correct project.

ILINX Content Store Search Panel

After the documents have been indexed, and stored in ILINX Content Store, the requestor will receive a notification email indicating that the document is available in the ECM system, this email will include a link to retrieve the documents from ILINX Content Store. Users can also search for documents via an ILINX Content Store saved search exposed through the ECM Portal.

So in the end, the ILINX solution provides the ability for the Access & Hearing staff to eliminate their paper based process and at the same time gives them the ability to quickly store their documents in a manner that meets both the immediate needs as well as other regulatory requirements such as Auditing, Retention Management and Public Disclosure.

The initial phase of this project was implemented rapidly. It included the requirements gathering, prototype build, review and approval of prototype, build of solution in Quality Assurance environment, QA testing, several iterations of change, a move to the Production the Environment, and finally Production testing. The time spent by IT on this project was just over 80 hours. Now that the business has their initial process in place we can rapidly expand their capabilities.