Putting in place an Enterprise Document Management System will ensure that government retains strategic control over the archival and management of critical documents by addressing the key requirements stated below.
- Long Term Centralized Archival of Documents used in Citizen Centric Services: Citizen centric processes like Driving License issuance process, Property Registration processes, Issue of Trade License etc. involve intensive handling of citizen documents. Being a critical component of service processing, these documents need to be available electronically. More importantly, they should be accessible even after the service delivery, so they can even be used 5-10 years later, if the need arises.
- Ensuring document quality in digitization of historical documents: Digitization of historical documents is an integral part of many large archiving initiatives such as High Court & Lower courts case files, land records, criminal records / documentary evidence etc. These records need to be archived with proper attributes case type, title, petitioner, date etc. This facilitates quick retrieval of required documents in future. Special attention needs to be given to the accuracy of the attributes, as these documents will primarily be used for future reference purposes. Any errors identified at that time will be tough to rectify and can have disastrous consequences.
- Preventing the loss of valuable documents by enforcing Record Management Policies: Documents need to be archived based on a proper classification structure, well defined metadata and record management rules. This ensures compliance with governance guidelines and standard operating procedures (SOPs). It is essential to keep track of these documents to prevent any loss/misplacement during their physical movement for processing, digitization and transit to the Record Room.
- Compliance with Open standards for long term archival: Open standards such as PDF/A should be used to ensure standardization and consistency. Long-term archival of documents should ensure that the documents can be retrieved and rendered with a consistent and predictable result in the future.
- Secure & Scalable management of billions of documents: The Repository for storing documents should be capable of handling storage and retrieval of billions of documents in a high-performance environment. Short term solutions like local disk or storing in databases cannot act as a substitute as they are highly unsecure and not scalable.
Using an Enterprise Document Management System for archival of Government documents provides the following benefits:
- Long term archival of documents in a proper structure
- Prevents loss of physical documents
- Maintains the quality of scanned documents
- Ensures strategic control over documents while providing highly secure and scalable infrastructure for managing documents.
