Wasn't paper supposed to go away? Isn't this the era of digital government? Then why are so many governments scanning pages into document imaging systems?

Some examples:

• In March, the National Archives and Records Administration awarded a $2.1 million contract for a solution to scan and process millions of government documents.
• The Indiana Department of Environmental Management recently used a service bureau to scan archives into a virtual file cabinet, providing online access to more than 9 million documents.
• Austin, Texas, implemented document imaging in two city departments since 2006 and is eyeing further applications.

Despite the e-government trend and the move toward enterprisewide information systems, there's still no end of paper in the public sector. Between government's historical archives and the myriad forms used to transact business, paper management is still a major challenge.

Many use document imaging systems to close the gap between hard copy and digital business processes.

Document imaging captures electronic copies of pages and provides tools for indexing, storing and retrieving them.

It allows users to manage workflow, ensuring employees handle documents according to established protocols.

Also, this technology may automatically apply records management rules, such as how long different document categories must be stored and when to purge them.

Document imaging is a subset of document management, a category that also includes documents that are "born digital"- word processing files, spreadsheets, e-mails and the like. Document management, in turn, is a subset of content management, which also may encompass photographs, videos, voicemail messages and other digital materials.

Document imaging fell out of favor around 2000, said Ralph Gammon, editor of Document Imaging Report, an industry newsletter published in Erie, Pa. "Everyone figured the electronic processes were going to wipe out paper." But that never happened. One possible reason, he said, is that printers kept getting faster and cheaper, making it easy to print just about anything.

"There are companies, and probably government agencies too, that will print out every e-mail they get and put it into a binder or a notebook," said Bob Zagami, general manager for the New England region of DataBank, in the company's Canton, Mass., facility. Zagami also serves as chairman of the board of directors of AIIM International, an industry association focused on enterprise content management.

Digital government initiatives have been hugely successful, said Dan Nore, director of the federal sales team at Kofax, a vendor of document management systems. "I just think that our expectations with respect to paper have been unrealistic," Nore said. Government activities will continue to require paper, and governments must learn to accommodate it within the e-government enterprise, he said.

Turnaround Documents
Although many more documents these days are born digital, paper dominates in two large government areas, making them strong targets for digital imaging systems, said Dan Elam, a managing director at the Gimmal Group, a document management consultancy. The first area covers functions that rely on "turnaround documents"- forms governments send out for people to complete and return. "Particularly in the government world, we realize that not everyone has access to a computer and not everyone is technology-savvy. So we end up using paper as a lowest common denominator to communicate with a lot of external people," Elam said.

The second major application for document imaging involves making old historical records easy to manage and retrieve, he said.

Vital records, tax collection, integrating documents with GIS data and any kind of licensing or permitting are excellent areas to consider for document imaging systems, said Zagami.

Records management is a major driver on the federal level, Elam said. In state governments, tax processing and child welfare are two big applications. Also, many