British borough council adopts paperless strategy to reduce budget

Despite reducing its budget, the Castle Point council has made a significant investment into iPads and document management software to support its reduced expenses through paperless efforts. According to Echo, the British borough, which has 41 council members, is driving home the value of paperless workflows and looking to enforce the elimination of paperwork once and for all.

"Only by going totally paperless will the council stand a chance of saving money though these purchases," Jonathan Isaby, chief executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance, told the source.

When updating technology to support such efforts, organizations like the Castle Point borough have to make several considerations – scalability, usability and ROI. If the investment is likely to cost more than it will save by the time the next upgrade is needed, it isn't worth it, but this is often a rare development. The optimal path for most groups is to start with the paperwork it already uses and grow from there.

The first step toward eliminating paperwork is considering how it is most often used. Many organizations will find that this is in searching through old records or making them available to the public. As such, a good place to begin is with conversion services to migrate paper archives to digital formats. Often, this will result in improved performance on multiple levels while laying a stronger foundation for future paperless efforts.

The optimization of workflow that paperless strategies brings will offset initial costs very quickly, as Castle Point as shown, but it's up to the users to maximize their own processes and start leveraging those benefits for greater growth and opportunity for themselves and the organization as a whole.

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