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Going paperless is a priority for plenty of human services agencies, yet many organizations lack funding, resources, or proper justification to invest in technology and are forced to continue relying on time-consuming, labor-intensive, paper-based file systems and processes.

For those readers that fall into the latter, consider this: maintaining the status quo could actually be doing more harm than good—and costing more—to your agency in the long run.

Below are five risks to think about if your agency relies too much on paper documents and manual processes.

Government’s IT procurement process is under fire.

For starters, it’s rigorous, antiquated, and time-consuming—a sentiment that rings true whether you’re the program administrator requesting technology, the state official managing access to the technology, or the provider, like us, working diligently to get your technology in agencies’ hands to help them help others.

Over the past few months, we’ve discussed a handful of factors that can make or break your human services technology implementation. Maybe you’ve read and bookmarked every post, or maybe this is your first time even realizing that this blog exists (in that case, hello!).

Either way, we thought it would be helpful to recap all the handy tips and tricks we’ve shared.

Now is the time for human services agencies to modernize their approach to document management.

In fact, as we publish this blog post, four out of five agencies are either actively in the process of doing so or planning to in the future, according to research from the Center for Digital Government.

Having the right people on a technology implementation team is make or break for project success. Too often in human services, the right people aren’t involved from the beginning and by the time the project hits end users, it’s dead in the water.

In our experience, assembling a clearly defined team is the first step toward increasing user adoption when it comes to technology. While the number of people involved may differ depending on the size of your agency and the scope of the project, the general makeup should be the same.

Have you ever rolled out a new technology solution, only for no one at your agency to use it? Frustrating? Of course. Fixable? Absolutely.

Technology is improving efficiencies in the workplace like never before. So why is it that so many human services agencies struggle with getting their teams to adopt these new tools? Why do some agencies implement a technology solution, only to watch it fail on the front lines?