Have Your Cake and Eat It Too: Digitization Makes Government Records More Efficient

By: In: Federal Government Records On: Aug 10, 2012
Have Your Cake and Eat It Too: Digitization Makes Government Records More Efficient

More and more government agencies are taking advantage of document imaging to make their data more accessible.   With a focus from the Obama administration on Open Government and FOIA, accessibility is a hot-topic.

The appeal for government agencies is largely due to the enormous volume of information that government agencies are responsible for managing. Every day, agencies accumulate a huge amount of data, much of it on paper. Whether we’re talking about the Environmental Protection Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Health and Human Services – they are all constantly writing and updating files and records.  On top of it, they need all of this data and information to provide services and fulfill their obligations to the public.

To make the most of this data, agencies need efficient management systems, and one of solution is digitization.  With digitization, though, records can be stored electronically, making them far easier to search through and locate. Instead of having to dig through piles of boxes and tightly packed file cabinets, government employees can do a quick keyword search to find what they need. This makes the government run more efficiently, and information more accessible

For example, think about how much of a hassle it is for you to go through your own personal records and receipts when filing taxes or anything of that sort. Now imagine that process on an exponentially larger scale.

Getting rid of your paper records can seem scary, but government agencies can have both, digitization of the most important documents, and retention of the original paper documents and deeper detail.  Then, if a paper record is needed, it can be imaged on demand and sent over to the requestor.

In addition, digitizing only some documentation can make the costs associated with digitization less daunting.

We all wish we could have our cake and eat it too.  With a smart digitization strategy you can do just that.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Related Content

← Predicting the Future of Federal Records Management Continuing Resolutions Mean Continuing Change →

Leave A Comment

*

About the author

Rachel Theran

Rachel Theran is the Product and Solutions Marketing Director for Iron Mountain Government Services. In this role, she is responsible for the go to market activities and communication of integrated solutions that meet the unique needs of our government clients. Prior to joining Iron Mountain, Rachel worked in risk management and direct marketing at American Express. She began her career working in IT consulting at AMS, helping state and local government divisions upgrade and maintain their accounting systems. Rachel holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a BS in Physics from the University of Michigan. Follow Rachel on Twitter @RachelTheran
http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2012/industry/federal-government-records/have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too-digitization-makes-government-records-more-efficient/
blogs.ironmountain.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-40
76653
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:RKYZ5PTPZ7NNHFFG4RUK3UPEGDODO6IZ
<urn:uuid:a05c00fc-375c-4ab5-b55c-675ba6b46eb3>
2015-10-07T06:47:44Z
205.186.134.35
sha1:E4722RSIDGFMHY6VDAQNMO4GXFU3YGWB
<urn:uuid:fc229bf0-3b2b-4a1d-97b2-476cde98652b>
http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2012/industry/federal-government-records/have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too-digitization-makes-government-records-more-efficient/
length
response
<urn:uuid:357022f4-9218-4c14-b8f8-a483b2ac96ee>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-137-6-227.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-40
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf