Interview with Dennis Risinger, CIO at FCS Financial

FCS Financial in Missouri, which is part of the national Farm Credit System, has seen double-digit growth rates over the past eight years, in part because of technologies that enabled it to replace massive volumes of paper documents with electronic documents. With 215 employees--60 percent working remotely much of the time--FCS Financial has benefited considerably from implementing an electronic workflow. In an interview with FierceCIO, FCS Financial CIO Dennis Risinger discusses how the company has reduced its paper storage needs, improved document access for employees in the field, enhanced customer service and saved money.

FierceCIO: What strategies and technologies do you use to give your mobile workers access to information and applications on the company network?  

Dennis Risinger: We have laptops, smartphones, iPhones all deployed with the workforce in the field, and they can connect into our network from all of those devices. They VPN in and connect very securely. Once we get them on our network, it's pretty much like they're sitting in their offices.  

We control the devices, the models and what's loaded on them. In the case of iPhones, we've turned off iTunes and the App Store. They can request that something be installed, like a calculator, and we have a process where we review those applications. I carry an iPad myself, but I do not have it integrated into our corporate network. We're still vetting it for its enterprise readiness, security being one part of that.

FCIO: Can you offer an example of how IT has promoted company growth by improving business processes?

Risinger: When I came to Missouri, we were still very much fax-based in our communications. Eight years ago, we deployed eCopy scanning technology [from Nuance]. That was a big one for us, and we coupled that technology with Cannon multifunction devices on our network. We estimate that we've achieved a 25 to 30 percent cost savings and efficiency gains from being able to convert paper loan documents to electronic forms. 

We have the ability to open information up so that our mobile workforce can access documents, whereas in the past they had to be near a fax machine. Someone had to go to the file cabinet and pull that information out and fax it to them. That wasn't that long ago.

Being able to put documents in electronic form and send them securely; being able to do mark-ups on electronic documents so employees can collaborate electronically--those are the types of things that pay off over the long haul.  

FCIO: How do you encourage people to use the available technology to reduce paper consumption and work more efficiently?

Risinger: We have a lot of opportunities to reduce paper in our environment. We've really focused on the user experience and worked on the user interface. We've deployed dual monitors for people using the document management system. When you have devices that can pull up pretty much a document-sized image and you don't have to do a lot of scrolling, I think you will continue to see inroads. 

When we brought in our first Cannon MFP device and eCopy scanning technology, we set it up and we went through a normal user implementation. Within a week, a lot of the employees were showing my IT people things about the technology that we hadn't even thought about. We thought we'd be dragging them through this process. With touch-screen technology, it's so intuitive that people adopted it from the get-go. 

For me, it's still easier to print it, carry it, touch it and mark it up, but I am really trying to force myself to use the technology that is available. It's really a cultural thing, and we have to keep chipping away at it. I cannot emphasize the importance of a simple user interface that employees do not need a lot of training to start using. 

FCIO: What was the feedback from top management when you initially planned to deploy document scanning technology?

Risinger: I probably didn't ask for approval upfront. No one had experienced that level of technology in our organization. They needed to see it, and they needed to experience it. It turned out to succeed far beyond my dreams and hopes. As CIOs, sometimes we have to take a gamble and get [the technology] into the hands of the users. That one paid off; not all of them do.

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