Paperwork. Few words evoke such a negative picture of government operations. Yet government is an information-intensive enterprise with a legal obligation to create and maintain huge volumes of public records. The paperwork problem exists in part because these records are caught up in processes that are antiquated, slow, error prone, and expensive. Document imaging and workflow management systems merge several technologies to convert paper documents to electronic images. However, they are expensive to implement and nearly always require extensive analysis, business process reengineering, and organizational change.
This report presents the results of a prototyping project that demonstrated document imaging and workflow solutions in the vehicle title operation at the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). The process of building the prototype answered a range of critical technical, managerial, and organizational questions.