Digital filing

What do you expect to gain by scanning your documents? My day job is document scanning systems, and I can't see any advantage for a typical ward.

... our ward is not typical... we have much more paperwork than average. I also think that searching for something in a hard drive would take less time than in a drawer... there would be more drawer space for paperwork that we cannot scan. I did find a wiki entry on the subject.

Thanks for the resource everyone!

pessoace wrote:I also think that searching for something in a hard drive would take less time than in a drawer...

Maybe. It depends on the filing process and if any of the content has been OCRed to make it searchable. But then if you have a good paper filing process, it's not hard to find the paper records.

Many commercial systems do not get installed because the company can not cost justify scanning everything unless the payoff in retrieval is enough to overcome the cost. Usually that only happens because of the way retrieval transforms the business process. Such as looking things up while on the phone, or remote retrieval.

pessoace wrote:there would be more drawer space for paperwork that we cannot scan.

I've never seen a scanning system cost-justify itself based on space savings. It can help, but it's never enough.

Also please keep in mind that you won't have this calling forever. Your successor is going to have to deal with what you've built. He may not have the same skills as you do.

pessoace wrote:... our ward is not typical... we have much more paperwork than average.

What is so special about your ward?

We're not necessarily special, but because of our location, we have immigrants from a number of countries, many of them need help and that produces quite a bit of paperwork. (on a regular basis)

Hey Russellhltn, you made some good observations... because we're still searching if it's doable or not, we haven't put much thought into how exactly we would run things, but we were considering the possibility of bishopric members being able to remotely access certain documents (and the bishop could even approve things on his ipad)...

more thoughts?

From the

Policies and Guidelines for Computers Used by Clerks for Church Record KeepingThe MLS database is stored on the computer’s hard drive.Other confidential files should not be stored on the hard drive. They should be saved on external media and locked in storage when not in use.

Also

No other software should be purchased or installed on Church computers unless it is approved by the stake president, is appropriately licensed, and does not interfere with the operation of or compromise the security of the Church software and data already on the computer. Privately owned software should not be installed on Church computers.

That gives you some additional hurtles that need to be cleared - in addition to the obvious question: What are you going to use?
Currently remote access to the computer is prohibited by policy. So I think you're going to have to go to some kind of external service for any kind of external viewing.

So far I still don't know exactly what this is to be used for. I can imagine that you must have quite a few requests for fast offering help. When I did that, everything was stapled to a check request form that the bishop signed and filed in check number order. Anything could be found fairly quickly.

As for approving things remotely, that's not really needed as long as you stick to a schedule and not let people wait until their power is to cut off tomorrow before they come for help to change that.