Centralized scans for export licenses. (Washington Pulse).

Navy officials are proposing to centralize the process of scanning documents that defense contractors submit to the government to obtain an export license. The military services and three other federal agencies have some degree of jurisdiction in the export control approval cycle. Each Defense Department service has elaborate procedures and rule sets for approving or turning down the license applications. As applications come in, documents are scanned into computers. "To a large degree, we are all scanning in the same documents at the same time," said Gibson LeBoeuf, deputy director of the Navy International Programs Office (IPO).

The Navy IPO is recommending that the scanning process be centralized, arguing that it would save thousands of work hours.

Lisa Bronson, undersecretary of defense for technology security policy and counterproliferation, supports the idea of centralized scanning, and the Defense Technology Security Administration, which she heads, is currently looking for ways to fund common scanning software so every agency will have the same system.