Creating the paperless office

A year ago, Oregon´s Construction Contractors Board was still largely dependent on paper files. Every day, its 50 employees handled an ever-increasing number of documents submitted by contractors and the general public. In fact, in each of the past seven years, the number of documents handled by the CCB has increased by 19 percent. The office now maintains more than 100,000 paper files, each one an important public document. Agency management knew it was not realistic to ask the state of Oregon for more resources. CCB management knew past solutions would no longer work; it needed to better apply technology to its business processes. Two years ago, the agency began to migrate from a proprietary Wang 5100 environment to an open, client/server system. The Wang databases and their corresponding applications would be converted to RDBMs. The office would be networked with other state agencies. And the IS staff would get new RAD tools to enhance and maintain the reengineered applications. Of all the technologies that CCB and its contractor studied, it was imaging/workflow products promise to improve the efficiency of the CCB. Last fall, the CCB began a one-year project to use imaging/workflow products to remove its dependence on paper files