Government Arms Up With ... Scanners?

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While scanners are rapidly becoming as ubiquitous as fax machines and copiers, agencies are using this basic technology not only to rid government offices of cumbersome stacks of paper but also to improve a slew of business operations.

Without question, scanners are now central to most government records archiving and retrieval efforts--a reality that's prompted agencies to make steady but significant investments in scanning technology. Government VARs have proved instrumental in swift scanner adoption rates, since integrators have helped many agencies weave scanning devices into antiterrorism and other mission-critical efforts, and administrative applications.

For the most part, solid government scanning sales are tied to agencies' general need to provide federal, state and local employees with access to imaged documents. Just as important is access for citizens and the business constituents these agencies serve.

Meanwhile, scanner sales have also gotten a boost from the constant demand for documents to satisfy major regulatory requirements that swirl around statutes, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Sarbanes-Oxley financial accountability law.

The bottom line is that scanners are changing the way agencies work, and VARs are a crucial part of that shift.

"The use of scanners is ultimately about process improvement and integration with other technologies, such as workflow and document or records management," says Michael Maziarka, a director at market-research firm InfoTrends in Weymouth, Mass. "There's now a real opportunity for resellers to help government agencies use scanners to extend existing systems."

Government solution providers aiming to help customers capitalize on scanner-centric applications don't need to look far for instances of how the technology has brought about pragmatic change for federal, state or local entities.

For instance, the Business and Regulation and Enforcement (BRE) unit of the Mississippi Secretary of State's office uses scanning solutions from Hewlett-Packard to help sniff out fraud and ensure compliance with state laws.

On the highest level, BRE can now quickly gather reams of documents from a specific Mississippi business undergoing a financial review, save those documents as PDFs or TIFFs and, if necessary, share that information with other states involved in multistate examinations or enforcement cases.

"There are many times when a company will bring in a large box of documents to our office, and during the course of an hour-long meeting, one of us can run to the scanner and image everything," says Michael Huggs, BRE senior securities analyst.

Once saddled with a box of documents hauled into BRE offices, Mississippi state examiners now rely on the scanning capabilities of HP's LaserJet 9050mfp, a flatbed scanner, to convert documents or images into electronic files and place those imaged documents into a variety of applications, such as Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, Exchange and IBM's Lotus Notes.

To improve document gathering in the field and make audits flow more smoothly for both BRE and local businesses, state auditors tote HP Scanjet 8290 flatbed scanners off-site. "We can save the documents on our laptops or tablet PCs and take them back to the office," Huggs says. "Our examinees are much happier now that we're not using half of their paper supply."

While BRE has tapped scanning technology to stop the collection of volumes of paper, the City of Philadelphia Streets Department uses scanners to capture irreplaceable historic documents.

"Many of the city's old documents were being sold off, and it was important to scan and archive the documents to be sure that all of the information was captured as accurately as possible without damaging the originals," says John Gallo, a product manager for the Wide Format Printing Division of Oce North America.

To scan and preserve the historic documents, Philadelphia also relied on an MFP, the Oce TDS450 monochrome scanner, which was bundled with Oce Image Logic software. The device analyzed and refined the original, archaic images and allowed Philadelphia users to capture even minute details that can be obscured in faint or folded areas common to older documents, Gallo adds.

In addition, many local officials and other government customers heavily use scanners in Geographic Information System, or GIS, applications, says Michelle Sheldon, Oce product manager. "The most common applications we see include the scanning of older, hard-copy documents, like city plans, sewer maps and large construction projects from the past," she says. "Scanning can be a substitute for copying, but the majority of government scanning we see is for the creation of a digital archive."

NEXT: How the war in Iraq has helped scanner sales.