The Work That Matters

Digital transformation dominates the headlines today. Business leaders are sharing remarkable stories of how they’ve driven transformative change in their organizations, from reinventing processes to shifting core competencies.

According to many of our customers, digitizing an organization’s records management program can increase staff productivity by 50 percent or more. One of my favorite stories comes from a one-man financial advisory firm in New England, which implemented Laserfiche records management and increased productivity by 30 percent—while also allowing the sole employee to work from the white-sand beaches of Aruba.

We have countless testimonies on newfound efficiency and other benefits of digital transformation. But the most inspiring and fulfilling use of digital transformation stems from the organizations that are dedicated to helping people. These reports often get less attention than the ones that demonstrate millions of dollars in cost savings, but to me, they most viscerally illustrate why digital transformation is an imperative.

Learning ARTS is an organization dedicated to the care of children with developmental disorders. It offers a wide variety of services to children and their families, including comprehensive treatment and social skills training for kids, as well as training for their families.

Recently, Learning ARTS used Laserfiche to automate its patient progress assessment. The process, which informs behavior analysts of patient behaviors, used to be performed in binders full of paper and took about two weeks. By creating electronic forms and automating the distribution of information, Learning ARTS’ behavior analysts can now incorporate patient progress into their instruction plans the very next day.

This innovation has led to significant improvements: Because behavior analysts have the most up-to-date information, patients receive care that is better suited to their needs. One patient “was nonverbal, with self-injurious behavior,” according to his mother. “He had meltdowns every hour, and did not sleep. We’ve seen massive improvement in all these areas in just the last six months.”

Another patient could not stand being around crowds or loud noises. “At the beginning of the summer he would run away from the pool; by the Fourth of July he was in the pool wanting to swim,” his mother reports. “I know there were a lot of changes that [Learning ARTS] went through in the paperwork and you can really see it in his progress and you can see it in the data.”

There are many other similar reports that connect real Laserfiche customer experiences to the technology improvements organizations make, making it much easier to understand how digital transformation impacts people’s lives.

The nonprofit Minnesota Valley Action Council transformed the way it authorizes heating bill assistance applications—automating the process so that it’s completed in days instead of weeks. According to the action council, the time saved means a lot to residents of a state with an average winter temperature of 15 degrees.

In Kansas, KVC Health Systems implemented a Laserfiche solution to make foster care records more accessible to authorized personnel at a middle school, empowering those employees to better work with a student who was acting out and disrupting classes. It was in those records that school officials learned that pizza and peanut butter were the keys to this child’s heart.

While business benefits like ROI often take the lead in case studies and news articles about digital transformation, we cannot lose sight of stories like those mentioned above. They show the true purpose for technology innovation: to enable people to do their best work.

They also prove that efficiency doesn’t always imply “less.” At Laserfiche, we build technology to empower people and organizations to do more of the work that matters. And I can’t think of work that matters more than changing lives.