It is known that within many organisations today, there are at least a few business processes/operations which are still using paper (physical/hard copy) somewhere.

It is also known:

• most documents today are born digital, because most of them are created using a Microsoft Office product such as Word or Excel.
• only a very small number of documents today are created on a typewriter or handwritten.
• most organisations are already either digitising/scanning any documents they receive in physical format/hard copy or they are now receiving most documents in digital format only.
• most documents that are created on a typewriter or handwritten are usually digitised and legitimately converted to digital format as stated above.

So why is it that many organisations still have several business processes/operations that still use physical documents somewhere?

There appears to be several barriers or obstacles that prevent business processes or operations from Going Digital and the following are examples of just a few of the typical, but untested, reasons provided by business:

• Legislation dictates that we must use physical documents, and that can be from the State Records Act to Tax Act, or even the Evidence Act.
• Our internal Policies dictate that we must use physical documents.
• Our staff are unable to use digital documents.
• The business process would need to be changed and we have no funds available.
• We need to purchase or have digital applications developed and there are no funds available.
• Our current business process works well and it ‘ain’t’ broken so why mend it?

We all know that the Evidence Act has been amended to permit the use of legitimately created digital reproductions and that the Transactions Act enabled the use of electronic approvals, via email and workflows, and enabled contracts to be born, signed, and witnessed digitally.

The Overcoming Barriers to Going Digital training course will support training participants:

• to fully test the many and varied reasons that your organisation has not been able to Go Digital.
• to then evaluate, address, and/or mitigate each of those reasons.

The course uses a Risk Assessment process based on the following four key aspects:

• The Digitisation process used within the organisation,
• Legal requirements,
• Business requirements, and
• Technological requirements.