* When the basement becomes a fire hazard with all the old paperwork
Note to my readers: I’m on vacation this week and my colleague Bill Heldman was kind enough to let me persuade him to volunteer to write this week’s newsletters. Bill also writes Network World’s outsourcing newsletter. If you enjoy what Bill has done, you may want to look at his newsletter as well. A link to that appears at the end of this article. — Mike Karp
Note to my readers: I’m on vacation this week and my colleague Bill Heldman was kind enough to let me persuade him to volunteer to write this week’s newsletters. Bill also writes Network World’s outsourcing newsletter. If you enjoy what Bill has done, you may want to look at his newsletter as well. A link to that appears at the end of this article.
— Mike Karp
In a previous life, I worked in the state and local government sectors. What an interesting period in my life! Think about government-use cases for a minute:
* A couple wants to get married and files for a marriage license. Where does the paper document reside in the city’s archives?
* A contractor files paperwork for a building permit: drawings, estimates, blueprints, plans and forms. How does one keep track of all the paperwork?
* A resident calls the wastewater department – there is a water main leaking. Where do those work orders go after they’re created?
* A county judge adjudicates a burglary case. What happens to the paperwork?
* Environmental technicians determine jet fuel has been leaking onto the tarmac of a major airport. Where does the massive quantity of documents generated from the investigation reside?
* State wildlife officials determine deer and elk herd locations and numbers. Where are all those maps and charts kept?
A typical day in government generates tens of thousands of documents – usually paper, typically crammed in a cardboard box and stored in a basement, or tucked away in a steel filing cabinet.
When I was a mid-manager at the IT organization of a city government, one county clerk I worked with actually had an entire basement of a large (and very old) building filled with unprocessed paperwork, including check payments. When the mayor gave the county clerk her annual performance review it read something like this: “Do something about all of the &*#@(!)@ paper!” So she did. She hired a company to (I’m not making this up) scan in all of the documents on desktop quality scanners and store the images on central IT servers. Did this fix the issue? Doubtful.
Here were the questions I had: Where are those documents stored (i.e., do you really trust server-based RAID5)? How would one guarantee that a legally binding document never changed once in its permanent electronic storage location? What about the perpetuity of the data – could a judge or an attorney review it in 25 years? How will all the data be indexed so that it can quickly be found? And what about the commonality of the forms? My county clerk friend had to take non-standard forms from a variety of organizations – one could not count on any one form matching another!
Enterprise Content Management systems purport to actually do something about all the &*#@(!)@ paper. You blend an enterprise-class document management system (such as Documentum, Filenet, Hummingbird, Adobe, et al) with high-quality storage arrays, all managed by a staffed, trained records management group. I’ll go into more detail next time.
