Most public sector organisations have a majority of documents stored digitally and nearly all have made going paperless a priority, according to the results of a new survey.
It was carried out by iGov for Kyocera Document Solutions, taking in interviews with senior officials in 123 public sector bodies between September and October of last year.
Among the results was that 58% reported that the majority of their documents are now stored digitally and 93% identified paperless operations as a priority.
But there is a still a lot of progress to be made: 87% reported a continued reliance on paper documents, with 17% saying this amounted to a heavy reliance. In addition, two-thirds said their back office processes were inefficient.
Kyocera’s UK group marketing director Joe Doyle said: “To embrace digital content management and abandon a paper led approach, the UK public sector needs to transform itself.
Additional problem
“The sector has been talking about digitisation for some time now, but even when organisations brand themselves as ‘paperless’, this often means they have scanned paper documents and dumped them on a hard drive. Rather than solving the problem of content, this moves it to the file server and creates an additional storage problem.”
Another element of the survey found that, several months after it came into force, there is a continuing preoccupation with the General Data Protection Regulation. 96% listed compliance with the GDPR as a priority for their organisation, 90% saw it as a necessary regulation to help improve data security, and 80% saw its implementation as a chance to improve the public sector’s relationship with customers.
