The amounts of documents public administrations have to process is hard to quantify. If you picture entire buildings used as archives however, you can imagine how much paper is piling up year after year. As mentioned before, many organizations still work largely on paper, or keep a paper-based process parallel to electronic file management (hybrid). In general, the flood of information world wide, including that for public administrations, is rising continuously, and when keeping the paper trail, the mountains of files keep growing, too.

To illustrate, I want to bring back Bret Swanson‘s keynote he held at Fabasoft’s talk the future 2008 (see an interview above). He spoke about the “exaflood”, the information dimension we are about to enter. The rapidly increasing amounts of data, made possible through (unfortunately not fast enough) expansion of broad band capacity world wide, and fed primarily by multi media applications, are easily in the range of Exabytes (10 to the power of 18), and increasing! Additionally, you have an enormous rise in mobile usage. On that topic, I recommend a fascinating presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit, which illustrates how especially the emerging economies keep growing in this area. It is not hard to imagine how these numbers might look like in a few years (and how comparatively conservative the growth numbers in the industrialized economies are):

What does that mean for the public sector? Keeping the paper trailer would mean, that a considerable part of the daily administrative work load would keep consuming material (paper), use space (file cabinets, folders), cause media interruptions (scanning, printing, sending) and pose barriers (no machine-readability). The longer organizations stay with paper, the longer and more costly a later switch will be. With the digital flow of communication rising, paper-based communication does not decrease however. Much that is communicated digitally, will later end up as a paper print out in a file. This is one of the reasons e-government could not reduce the paper trail in the public sector: because the reduction in paper communication happened before an overall rise of communication, a widespread culture of printing things and a parallel paper trailer, which turned all progress void. Where should this lead? Just look at any given website of a tax- or registration authority, to get a glimpse of the current state of e-government. I have seen forms there that cannot be filled out on the screen, and when printing them it turns out it was not smart to offer those in light green shadings. The only thing it changed: Not having to go there to get that piece of paper. We are still at the beginning of mobile device use, and we are seeing remarkable applications in the consumer market. Some people live off their iPads, and in the meantime, the public sector is still trying to wrap its head around PDF documents.

In all fairness, even those organizations that have yet to catch up to the possibilities, work at least partially ICT-based. The general switch to some electronic file processing (word processors) and E-Mail have brought about some increase in comfort and throughput – at least in non-binding communication – but this progress was counterproductive in terms of consistency and further archiving. The gained capacity without a consistent and legally binding filing system based on business cases, was bought at the price of incomplete data, high search effort due to multiple filing and additional paper production to achieve at least a minimum of comprehensive archiving. The common question “is this document in our mail system, on a local hard drive, on the network storage, a portable storage or on some filing tray?” shows, what dead end this has maneuvered some organizations into. This is surely one reason why without necessary consequences and commitment to unified file preservation in consistent and binding business cases, an added value from a holistic perspective is hard to explain. Initiating reform processes and change management are thus all the more harder to achieve.

Against the background of the increasing information flood, and the described shortcomings in many administrations, the urgency for flexible, standardized and tested processes and technologies that can be rolled out step by step and transition the organizational work into the digital realm, becomes even more clear. Fabasoft offers the platform and the experience for that. The technological evolution is advancing faster than ever. It is both wrong to wait for the day on which new technologies are as safe as many wrongly assume it to be the case with paper and ink, and it is also wrong to keep creating more complicated organizational mosaics, as each piece complicates a general reform of the public sector even more.

Related posts:

1. Separating the information from the medium – An inconvenient truth about e-government
2. 5 Cornerstones of Successful E-Government Projects
3. No more constrains – will mobile devices cut through red tape?
4. Fabasoft at Infodocum 2011