Why going paperless enhances agency compliance

by: Terri Jones

I spent most of my government career in agencies that had a combination of state and federal funding sources. Because of this, we had significant compliance responsibilities – including program delivery, reporting, long-term compliance and even HR and accounting policies that were layered on top of our obligations as a state agency.

Not surprisingly, the scope and breadth of this compliance was complicated. As we hired new staff members, there was no clear way to train them and teach them about our rules. And, if we had any gaps in our understanding of how we need to apply rules, we passed these knowledge gaps on through this informal training process. Any errors could be discovered by auditors later, which would cause us to lose funding and gain additional scrutiny.

Our first strategy to cope with our compliance burden was to buy data systems from vendors who understood the types of programs we were delivering. Within the database, by virtue of fields, we provided our staff with the most rudimentary of tools to ensure that we performed certain project tasks. Except this wasn’t enough. Because, as we discovered, the database did not dynamically notify staff about tasks, time our processes or even notify managers if tasks were seriously overdue. We needed help.

Enter enterprise content management (ECM).

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