No Reward For Capture?

Recently, I was sent a link to this blog by Daniel Chalef on active document capture. He references an AIIM article where survey respondents rate their success or failure with quality and vendors. Both resources are well worth reading and available to the public. The blog discusses strategic ways to achieve an organizational benefit with document capture. There are a few practical examples I wanted to share.

What active documents do organizations still get in paper form? A frightening array, including contracts (from sales to loan applications), invoices and billing statements, checks, etc. Any of these document types can be electronic, and they probably all will be, all the time, sometime in the future. While we're holding our breath, it's a good idea to look at how we might treat all this paper.

Scan those contracts and make them part of whatever project, real estate deal, or program they relate to. While you might limit access to management, your intranet should be the place to hold those documents. Someone has to ensure the appropriate terms of service, and that's pretty easy to do with a searchable scanned file. Invoices can be scanned and presented directly in your accounting system, especially if your organization receives a number of the same invoices from the same contractors. You can even set up a field recognition feature to present the dollar amount right in the system, with the scan attached to the contractor record for reference. Checks should also be scanned and added to your accounts payable records.

So what do you do with the paper? Get rid of it... sometime. There are federal, state, municipal, industry, and organizational rules about that, and not every stakeholder treats scans as an approved substitute. That being said, as a rule of thumb, I would suggest that your paper documents have no practical use after the following fiscal year. In other words, paper files you received and scanned in 2009 can probably go away in 2011 without much fuss. Just make sure you take good care of your scans.

Transparency Overhead

The federal government's Open Government Initiative is actually moving along, which surprises me. A lot of people who have tried to get government information know the runaround: endless phone calls, letters, and emails if you're lucky. At last, the threat of a FOIA request was usually enough to shake a document loose months later. Some agencies have been proactive in publishing their plan to meet the initiative, and a few are behind. The Sunlight Labs Open Watcher page at http://sunlightlabs.com/open/ is an easy way to track some of the bigger departments and how well they have complied with OMB's directive. As you can see, most of the departments on the list haven't published three high-value datasets or created the "Open" page on their department website. For those departments in compliance, I have a followup question: what do you have besides datasets?

There are millions of pages of documents that do not exist in electronic format in the federal government, and the Open Government Initiative needs to address them. I was at a government trade show this week, and one of the attendees explained how her agency was trying to get college kids to sit in a room and scan paper all summer. That doesn't sound like a serious commitment to me; it sounds like a recipe for failure. As outlined in the OMB document, departments and independent agencies must first identify documents with high value to the public. Next comes the conversion, which can be handled many ways. My recommendation is to find a contractor who can take those documents away, scan and OCR them, then destroy the documents if appropriate. Specialists with high-speed scanners can do ten times the work and cost less compared to a 19-year-old with an old hand-feed scanner, and specialists have their own office offsite. In addition, a professional document management company can provide quality assurance and help with taxonomy.

There are other good reasons to scan. Agencies have whole rooms full of old paper, creating wasteful spending on real estate plus a fire hazard and a huge information risk to manage. In addition, with many civilian baby boomers leaving government over the next few years, no one will know what's in those file cabinets anymore. The paper may as well be blank when those boomers retire.

Will the Open Government Initiative help people understand and participate in the federal government better? Information is not knowledge, but you can't gain knowledge without it. It should be easier to find waste and ineffective programs, and the press can help spotlight problem areas.

How committed is the government to this? The biggest indicator will be what happens when some of these agencies don't meet the deadline. It's coming up very soon, and there should be consequences for failure. Watch this blog for an update.

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