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What You Missed at Elevate

November 21, 2022 / #Unstuck Government
AINS Annual Summit and User Conference Recap and Top Takeaways

On November 3, AINS hosted its first-ever Hybrid Summit, with several hundred federal, state, and local government leaders who joined us either live in DC or virtually via Zoom. Our event celebrated our customer community’s critical work building trust in public institutions; introduced AINS’ vision and strategy for the future – along with our new CEO, Howard Langsam; and provided countless opportunities for our customer community to reconnect, share best practices, and learn more about how our FOIAXpress and eCASE solutions help government offices run more efficiently and effectively. Our attendees included the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) community, Offices of Inspectors General (OIG), IT leaders, Human Resources, and Senior Leaders. 

Below we’ve included a highlights list to recap our event. If you’re interested in accessing any of our session replays, please contact us directly with your question or top areas of interest. 

The “Elevate” Highlights:  

Refreshed Mission and Vision: Our CEO, Howard Langsam, shared a refreshed mission and vision for AINS, anchored around the idea “good enough for government isn’t good enough.” We are committed to delivering exceptional technology experiences to our customer community. To support this objective, several members of the AINS team spoke to the three key tenets core to our strategy: 1) built-for-government case management software that works out the box; 2) improvements to customer product adoption to ensure our technology helps bring operational excellence to government offices; and 3) opportunities to make individual products work better as a suite.

Top Session #1: FOIA Advisory Committee member and AINS leader Ben Tingo led one of our sessions with the best attendee feedback: Make It Modern – You Can’t Build Your Legacy on Legacy FOIA Systems. In this session, he spoke to AINS’s focus on transparency and open government and talked about how new technology can ensure a streamlined, more efficient FOIA management process in the face of more requests – and especially more complex requests. AINS and our partner network provide several new capabilities designed to accelerate document collection and FOIA request processing, including document management, eDiscovery, artificial intelligence, redaction, multimedia redaction, and more. 

Top Session #2: Training lead Caroline Ige provided a deep-dive training into FOIAXpress’s document management capabilities, taking live Q&A and demonstrating expert-level tips and tricks to help customers get the most out of FOIAXpress. Caroline’s walkthrough of critical features like the Find & Redact tool and the advanced search helped our attendees see the quickest ways to find and process the necessary documents. One of our attendees remarked, “This is an amazing time saver, not to mention the consistency it provides!” 

Roadmap Sneak Peek: We shared a sneak peek of our product roadmap for 2023, focusing specifically on open government, audit and investigations, and our human resources solutions: employee and labor relations and EEO complaints. Highlights include: a) user experience and user interface upgrades for our FOIA products; b) more robust training for our Office of Inspector General customers, streamlined audit management and tracking, and a new eCASE Investigations mobile app; and c) workflow improvements for employee and labor relations and our EEO complaint products. 

eCASE Investigations for Mobile: Our Investigations community had a preview of our eCASE Investigations mobile app, designed to go anywhere an investigation goes. Our team has designed this capability with end user input around investigators’ top needs for an on-the-go tool. Limited service in-the-field, the team-based nature of investigations (i.e., multiple users), and multimedia evidence capture have all informed the design of this exciting new application.  

Community: The whole AINS team was thrilled to host our users in-person for the first time since 2019. We hosted several hundred customers and partners in-person and had several hundred more attendees join us virtually as well. As a community of passionate government insiders, our user conference is designed to help our FOIA, OIG, and HR customer communities share ideas and to support their ability to work effectively with our products and people. For in-person attendees, we had our support team available for in-the-moment consults, our product team seeking product feedback and input on our roadmap, and multiple members of our team facilitating both formal and informal networking opportunities. 

Partners: We welcomed five partners on-site, including Carahsoft, Thundercat (veteran-owned), Copper River (Alaskan Tribal-owned and 8(a) certified entity), and DTSI, all of which partner with us on the procurement and delivery processes for our solutions. We also hosted Veritone and IP DataSolutions, two of our newest partners that expand our FOIAXpress redaction capabilities across video and text messages.  

CPE Availability: We were excited to introduce continuing professional education credits (CPEs) this year. Attendees of the full conference will earn more than 6 total credits for their participation.  

We would like to thank all our customers and partners for joining us this year. We are proud to sit at the center of a vibrant community of government professionals and play a part in helping our changemaker customers leave their legacy. Big thanks to all our customers for choosing AINS as a partner to bring operational excellence to your organization.  

If you’re interested in accessing replays of our full conference, please let us know here. 

Keep an eye on our events page for announcements around our 2023 events. 

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