CASE STUDY
For centuries , the Tower Hamlets area was a key location within Britain ’ s port industry . Today , it has been transformed into one of London ’ s fastest growing and most densely populated boroughs . The population in the borough has doubled in the past 30 years and is predicted to rise by almost 100,000 by 2031 . Tower Hamlets Council is responsible for managing the area ’ s
LARGE FILES CAN NOW BE BROKEN DOWN ELECTRONICALLY INTO SMALLER FILES THAT COVER SMALLER GEOGRAPHIC AREAS . growth and development while continuing to provide residents with high-quality services . In 2007 , the council embarked on a comprehensive Digitisation Programme , which began with a vision to bring Laserfiche enterprise content management ( ECM ) and business process management ( BPM ) functionality to the council ’ s functions and processes .
Initially , many of the council ’ s services were heavily paper-based and inundated with on-site and archived documents . Searching for the correct documents became increasingly difficult and indexing all documents seemed impossible . The Land Charges Service was managing 15,000 paper files by hand – using a typewriter to register Land Charge entries on index cards . Information requests would routinely take the target turnaround time of 10 days . The Building Control Service had 1,500 boxes of 50,000 unscanned files – 3 million pages and 100,000 drawings . And the Town Planning Service was housing 400,000 paper files dating back to 1948 .
“ We had a ton of information held with a storage company ,” said John Pulman , ICT Client Officer at the
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