IT Department to go paperless soon

Arjun Raghunath
The New Indian Express
14 Dec 2010

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Kerala Government is making rapid strides in e-governance with the State Information Technology Department becoming paperless.
All files pertaining to the IT Department at the Secretariat will be transferred electronically once the paperless system is launched, which is in the offing.
IT Secretary Ajaykumar said that the paperless system was in the final stages of implementation and it would be launched within a few days.
“To begin with, we are implementing it in the IT Department. The Civil Supplies Department will become paperless in another couple of months and it will be extended to other Departments in a phased manner,” he said.
Titled Digital Document Filing System, the system is being implemented by Keltron with the support of a private IT firm. As a prelude to the implementation of paperless office, all the existing files of the IT Department will be in electronic form.
Old files to be digitised
The old files are being digitised under the ongoing project for digitisation of all files and records of various departments in the Secretariat.
The Secretariat file digitisation project is being integrated with the paperless office system so that previous files will be available for reference at the click of a mouse.
Already around four lakh files of various departments are digitised and the digitisation project has been integrated with the paperless office system.
The entire files of IT Department will be passed on to various levels, including Ministers, electronically.
Certain files of the IT Department need to be circulated to other departments also. Such file movements would also become paperless.
In order to ensure security, the responsibility of the officials at each level has been fixed. Separate Government Orders were also issued in this regard.
Storage capacity
One of the biggest challenges involved in the project is the storage capacity. Normally, every files of various departments in the Secretariat are voluminous as policy matters are involved and several rounds of circulation among various officials are involved. In order to sort out the issue, a Storage Area Network , a high-speed special-purpose network that interconnects various kinds of data storage devices, may be installed in future.