Showing posts with label Government Paperwork Elimination Act. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Government Paperwork Elimination Act. Show all posts

April 22, 2012

I Hate Paper

Paper has been around for approximately two thousand years, since it's invention in China, and it has served as the medium of choice for recording and sharing information ever since. 

However, enter the age of information technology and we are now able to capture, process, and store far more information, quicker, cheaper, and more efficiently than we ever could with paper. 

Combine that with the environmental impact and the need to conserve, and we have numerous federal laws calling for the reduction or elimination of paper, to the extent practical.

1) The Paperwork Reduction Act (1980) calls for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to regulate collection of information and establish information policies to reduce the paper handled by the government. 

2) The Government Paperwork Elimination Act (1998) mandates the use of electronic forms, filings, and signatures for official business with the public. 

3) E-Government Act (2002) requires use of the Internet to improve citizen access to information and services. 

All three are a recognition of the need to move from costly paper-based processes and the management of maintenance of mountains of paper records to instead leverage information technology to re-engineer and improve the way we perform information management. 

It's funny, but for me it's almost become a personal crusade to make better use of information technology to perform our mission and business of government more effectively, and I personally keep as little paper records, as possible--instead choosing to manage predominantly online--and it's great.   

Aside from having a cleaner office--no paper files, I enjoy all the benefits of electronic filing, search, and the ability to quickly share files with others in the office without having to rummage through a stack of papers 3 feet deep! 

Working in some areas that are still paper intensive for case management and so on, I have taken on the mantra, which I frequency cite of "I hate paper!" 

No, I don't really hate it, but in order to change decades old manual and paper intensive processes, we need to exaggerate a little and tell ourselves and other we hate it, so we can help change the inefficient and costly status quo. 

You can only imagine how surprised I was to read in The Atlantic (20 April 2012)--that "Paper: [Is] The Material of the Future."

Essentially, the article touts the new developments with paper using nanotechnology to make it water-proof (although you can still write on it), magnetic, fluorescent, and even anti-bacterial. 

Imagine paper that you can stick to your file cabinet, spill coffee on, light up the room with, and even keep you from getting sick--yes, that's fairly impressive!

However, while these new features are wonderful indeed and will increase the usability of paper as well as improve records management of them, I do not want to see us get complacent with reducing our use of paper and making better use of technology.  

Even with these cool nano-tech improvements to paper coming our way, I am still going to say, "I hate paper!"

(Source Photo: here with attribution to Earthworm)

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August 22, 2008

Document Management and Enterprise Architecture

Years ago, we heard the mantra that paper was going to go away and we were entering the age of the paperless society.
But this vision has not come fully to fruition.
Public CIO Magazine, August/September 2008, reports that “everyone figured the electronic processes were going to wipe out paper, but that never happened. One possible reason is that printers kept getting faster and cheaper.” (Ralph Gammon, editor and publisher of the Document Imaging Report).
Paper is plentiful in the public sector as well.
Despite the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, “which requires the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to report to congress on the paperwork burden imposed on the public, the feds are allowing the overall burden to grow.”
“The OMB’s latest report, Information Collection Budget, FY 2007, reports the burden increased from 8.24 billion hours in fiscal ’05 to 9.92 billion hours in ’06, a rise of more than 8 percent.” This amounts to an average of 39 hours in 2006 for the average adult in the U.S. to complete government paperwork.
Why is the government not cutting back on paper in lieu of digital solutions when communicating with the public?
“We realize that not everyone has access to a computer and not everyone is technology savvy. So we end up using paper as the lowest common denominator to communicate with a lot of external people.”
Over time, as technology continues to permeate our society, the necessity for paper solutions for the masses will decrease.
Even now with federal tax submissions (which account for roughly 78% of the total paperwork burden on the public), electronic submissions are available and being used by more and more taxpayers:
“Electronic Tax Filing begain in 1986, with the transmission of 25,000 refund-only individual income tax returns, [and]…as of October 19, 2004, more than 63 million individual returns had been filed electronically - 42 million from tax professionals!” (http://www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=120353,00.html)
In enterprise planning for electronic document solutions for our organizations, we need to work towards ever more sophisticated solutions for the creation, storage, handling, search and retrieval, retention, and disposition, collaboration, and security of information. These solutions should provide for a feature rich electronic document environment including: document management, version control and workflow, record management, imaging and optical character recognition, and overall content management.
Through implementation of electronic document management solutions, we can continue move our enterprises toward enhanced worker productivity, reduced burden on our customers/partners/stakeholders, cost savings, better access to information and hence better decision making capability, and compliance with mandates such as the Paperwork Reduction Act, Government Paperwork Elimination Act, Federal Records Act, and Freedom of Information Act.
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February 9, 2008

The Paperless Society and Enterprise Architecture

For years, we’ve all heard the promise that technology will soon make us a paperless society—but it hasn’t!

In the book, Sacred Cows Make The Best Burgers, by Kriegel and Brandt, the authors state that “most people’s desks look like they’ve been hit by a paper avalanche.”

Have things gotten better or worse?

Kriegel and Brandt state that between 1983 and about 1996, “shipments of paper actually increased by 51%.

Further, they state that “a vice president of a major telecommunications company showed us a study that...on average, people got over 90 hours’ worth of “stuff” to read each week! And only 20 percent of that was electronic...the same study showed that despite all the advancements in information technology, the amount of paper received today had not been reduced from ten years ago.”

Do we need all this paper?

Absolutely not. “50 percent of a company’s paperwork could be eliminated without the slightest disruption to business.”

In fact, the authors recount a telling story about how a courageous manager and his/her employees slowly eliminated parts of a costly, time-consuming detailed 10 column monthly report they put together for the management committee, by first eliminating some columns and then more and more until finally they produced only 4 key columns quarterly. Instead of the management committee complaining, no one even noticed anything was missing (the columns or later the monthly report), until after a number of months, the CEO congratulated them on their good work with the new clear and simple quarterly report.

What has the government done to reduce paperwork?

  • Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, “one of the principal requirements of the PRA is that organizations must have OMB approval before collecting information from the public (such as forms, general questionnaires, surveys, instructions, and other types of collections).” (http://www.usa.gov/webcontent/reqs_bestpractices/laws_regs/paperwork_reduction.shtml)

What should we do in our organizations to reduce the paperwork?

According to Kriegel and Brandt, if paperwork doesn’t “add value to the customer, increase productivity, or improve morale,” then it should be eliminated.

From a User-centric EA perspective, we need to ask our users and stakeholders if they really need or want the paperwork we’re giving them, and if not we need to update our business processes and enable technology solutions to eliminate the legacy paper-based solutions. To some extent this is occurring already, in other cases, it is not. The more we become an information-based society, the more we need and crave information and some people don’t trust the technology or simply want a hard-copy to read or for their records. Paper is not a bad thing. It is a tried and true method of recordkeeping and communication, but when we have so much that we cannot even keep up with it, then it’s definitely time to reevaluate our true needs and go a little easier on our environment. Why chop down all those trees, for reports, proposals, print-outs, and projections that often just end up, unread in the round file (i.e. the garbage) anyway?


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