The city of Chicago is looking to go paperless, but digitizing won’t be easy:

“‘You can’t move forward with technology in government if you’re redundantly moving around multiple copies of pieces of paper,’ he says. ‘To me, it’s shocking that we’re still talking about forms.’

“But Hillman also acknowledges that there are major roadblocks. Cost is less an issue, he surmises, than overcoming the governmental status quo.

“To make a paperless government work, ‘you would need a paradigm shift,’ Hillman says. ‘You have entire departments — the fire department, the Department of Revenue — that run with their paper. This is how they do things. So when you shift to a paperless government, you have major staffing changes. You have people saying, ‘Well this is not how we do this.’ So that’s going to be the biggest hangup.’

“But it may be more than a mere hangup.”