So people spend a lot of time and effort dealing with document overload and trying to pull information together, and they still can’t get a complete and timely picture of what’s happening. Lack of strong data management makes it difficult to do the job—permitting takes longer and non-compliance is harder to uncover.

Dan Childers: Oftentimes environmental agencies are resource constrained in terms of both budget and staff. They don’t have enough people to handle growing workloads and reporting responsibilities, and this new work requires new information and analyses. Work processes are too manual and labor-intensive, which makes them too time-consuming and errorprone. So it’s no surprise that many agencies face constant and lengthy backlogs. Many agencies are also seeing more staff turnover and retirements than they are accustomed to, so institutional knowledge, capability, and experience are being lost. All of these factors slow processes down, and manual audits and inspections often aren’t able to detect non-compliance or fraud in a timely fashion. That’s frustrating for agency staff and management. They simply need better tools to do the job.