Paperless university — How we can make it work?

At present time all administration processes in many universities of Uzbekistan are mainly paper based. It requires the usage of huge amount of paper, leads information lose and overlapping, creates bureaucracy barriers for students and teachers. One of examples is the administration system of Tashkent University of IT (TUIT): all documents starting from admission until graduation process are mainly paper based. The digitalization of documents is easy, but how to go further? How to control the volume of e-documents, how to properly share it with colleges? How we can avoid the repetition and duplication of documents? Main purpose of this paper is to find the answer for these questions. This is not single case, paperless campus is remaining to be dream not for only TUIT, but for many other universities too. Many universities all over the world tried to switch from paper-based admissions to a completely paperless system. Universities are looking for software technologies, which can help them to eliminate the huge amount of mail received/sent, easily present student records and documentation, and can share files between multiple administration staffs. Going to paperless is important for current ecological situation - universities can help to save natural resources. But the most important thing is that, it is the way of improve the university management and make administration process much easier and faster. In this paper we are trying to find the ways of making university paperless by using information system of University Management. This information system should avoid repetition of documents and help share important data between all departments. This system can be seen like a combination of mobile and web application and services. Classification of documents helps to control, for this reason we divide all the types of documents in university to groups and identify the owners (who is responsible for creating and making changes) and users (who can see, print or copy) of these documents. Current and suggested models of university management are presented and the possibility of creating new mobile applications for providing new services is highlighted. Our suggested model of paperless university is built in case of Tashkent University of IT (TUIT) but can be implemented to other universities too. This paper considers the paperless university as one of the constituent elements of “E-government” system. Developing of a complex information system “Education” is a part of Master plan of developing E-government in Uzbekistan. This system will be used to control all educational processes within universities and in the level of Ministry of Higher and Secondary Special Education of the Republic of Uzbekistan. The reasons of going paperless, the benefits which can be reached by going paperless are listed here, also some successful examples of ongoing projects in different countries and universities all over the world are also presented. In future this model can be improved by adding new IT solutions which will appear in market.