I used to work for Child Protective Services. Part of my job involved going to court with the families that were under our care. Whenever we went to court, we were required to take all of the case files with us. Some families had been under the care of the system for a dozen years or more. They had three or four huge boxes filled with paperwork related to their cases. Every time that we went to court with one of these families, we would have to get out a dolly and drag those boxes of paperwork to the courthouse. And on the rare occasion that someone in the courtroom asked for the information that was in those files, we’d have to manually sift through the papers to find the information. It astounded me that this government agency was still using such an archaic system of filing.

I brought this up a few times with my supervisor. I tried to explain to her that there are document management software solutions which can be used to scan all of these papers into a computer file. I suggested that it might be worth the government’s money to invest in the services of a document imaging service which could do that scanning for us. Then we could take a single computer to the courtroom for all of our cases instead of dragging out those old files. I never really got an answer as to why we couldn’t do it this way but when I left the job they were still doing it the old way. What an awful waste of time and paper!

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