The Government’s ongoing Digital by Default strategy was set out in 2012 by Francis Maude, minister for the Cabinet Office, whose intention was to redesign public services to make them 'so straightforward and convenient that all those who can use them will choose to do so while those who can't are not excluded'.
Since then, a string of high-profile announcements have been made regarding the use of paperless technologies, including the Government’s £160m plan to improve the speed and efficiency of the criminal justice system. In July 2013, it announced the intention for courtrooms in England and Wales to become fully digital by 2016 to end what it described as 'an outdated reliance on paper'.
The widespread use of electronic prescribing and electronic patient records in the NHS is also expected to free-up time for staff, clinicians and GPs. Elsewhere in the public sector, paper-based processes have been digitised at Revenue and Customs, the Ministry of Justice, the Department for Transport, the DVLA and the Ministry of Defence, all with the aim of creating more efficient systems and processes.
One of the biggest drivers of this race towards digitisation is cost: the more members of the public go online to find the answer to their enquiry or make a claim, the more employee time and therefore budget is saved.
However, with many users still basing their attitudes towards public sector organisations on the experiences they have with customer service representatives, councils and other public-facing operations are still under an enormous amount of pressure to respond quickly and satisfactorily to all types of interactions.
The wide-reaching capabilities paperless technologies can deliver include the ability to improve compliance, disaster recovery, staff productivity and overall efficiency in records management. However, for the public sector, the major value of automated document management also lies in its potential to support staff with faster access to up-to-the-minute data. In turn, this can help them to improve the speed and quality of their interactions with members of the public.
The use of digital mailroom solutions, for instance, can see incoming documents scanned and distributed electronically as soon as they are received by the receptionist, post room or outsourced document management firm.
From an employee’s perspective, this takes away the need to wait for post to arrive on their desk and open it before starting to process the content. Where the system allows, the document may not only be received by an individual much faster than before, but also arrive in a process-ready electronic format – scanned, prepared, classified and, in some systems, with the relevant data already extracted.
Employees and authorised third-parties can all access data from a centralised source, making collaboration across projects and departments much easier. Meanwhile, when adding new information and files, document classification enables measurable data to be quickly identified and instantly passed to the right business stream or workflow.
The fact that document management systems capture data as soon as it enters the business also means that errors can be instantly flagged through data cleansing. As a result, any mistakes can be identified and resolved as quickly and cost effectively as possible – reducing the potential for error and any subsequent impact on customer service.
Anthony Pearlgood is managing director at PHS Data Solutions
