[vox] Paperless Office Transition

[Shwaine]

On Mon, 12 Sep 2011, Kevin Schultz wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> Does anyone here work in an environment which has transitioned to a
> paperless (or paper-less, as it may be) office?
> 
> I have been tasked with working as part of a team to transition our large
> governmental agency to a paperless office. :o)
> 
> Curious what opportunities, pitfalls, ideas everyone has. 
>

You've already got some good advice on going paperless. Now I'll put in my
2 cents:

Don't neglect your infrastructure in the transition. This is not a time to
skimp on sys admin salaries, backup systems, multiple redundancies, etc.
That includes locational redundancy. You don't want a fire, flood,
earthquake or even something as mundane as an extended power outage to
destroy or prevent access to the data. I was at a NSF conference once when
the power was out at NSF headquarters. Not only did that take down all
grant submission websites (because there was no plan in place to switch to
an offsite secondary location), but only one employee of the group had a
local backup of his presentation (and this was a group of computer
people).

You don't want to be in that position. If your paperless office transition
plan does not address this issue, now is the time to do so. The safety and
integrity of the data should not be an afterthought. Also keep in mind the
law is still evolving when it comes to what electronic documents have to
be retained (for example, are emails memos that need to be retained or
more analogous to a phone call that does not?). This may greatly impact
your budget.