An initial study had been conducted by the PERICENT team in different states of India to understand the level of digitalization and to understand how digital paper-based operations had been implemented in reality by various government departments internally.
Surprisingly, inspite of having a lot of initiatives announced by the government for digital paper-based operations. Our survey team had noticed that most of the departments in Government/PSUs still having their internal processes are mostly paper-based. They are still quite dependent on paper-based processes & practices for process files. All kinds of approvals mostly happen on the physical documents. This way, what is the accountability of internal operations? Overall, wasting a lot of time, paper, space, Human Resources, finally a lot of money.
Although PERICENT team had observed that some level of digital solutions is there as nowadays many departments are providing their services online to citizens. However, it is a reality that most of their internal processes are still paper-based.
So, according to Sanjay Sharma ( founder and expert in software automation technology), most of the government departments are still up to the old way of physical paper-based processes is a reality for almost every department. All the historical data of many departments are in form of the paper-based files. PERICENT team had seen a dump of files stacked around in government departments and soon becoming unusable assets as time passes.
Also, PERICENT had noticed that digitalization initiatives in these departments are merely just scanning historical physical documents and storing them on a hard drive on the server. So it is like protecting those historical physical files in form of images. However, this physical paper generation keep continues.
Now, what next? this way, the generation of physical papers would continue. We can’t really access the historical scanned files based on information written on the files or using information about the file without having a comprehensive system in place. How we will monitor the turnaround time (TAT) in case of manual processing of a file, if need to check the history of processing a file, it might be difficult to know?
So, where is the real problem?, why departments are still not equipped with the right technology platform practices? Why has the culture to use secure digital paper-based processing is not yet changed?
PERICENT BPM AND DMS SOFTWARE (P) LIMITED – A Document and Process Automation Company, is an enterprise technology firm based in Jaipur helping organizations for simplifying approvals, compliance, audit processes as well as for instance access of the information on any document. The company believes that operational performance, accountability, and process compliances can be better increased by automation of key driving elements(document, process, roles, and policies) in any organization including private and public.