8 Reasons to Outsource Document Management

Posted on May 10, 2010 in Records Management News

8 Rea­sons to Out­source Doc­u­ment Management

Today’s guest post was a group effort by some of the folks at Iron Moun­tain. Iron Moun­tain is a world leader in infor­ma­tion man­age­ment ser­vices, assist­ing more than 140,000 orga­ni­za­tions in 39 coun­tries on five con­ti­nents with stor­ing, pro­tect­ing and man­ag­ing their infor­ma­tion. Iron Moun­tain cur­rently safe­guards and pro­vides access to more than 425 mil­lion cubic feet of paper records, 10 bil­lion emails, 65 mil­lion com­puter backup tapes, 2.5 mil­lion PCs and 20,000 servers.

Iron Moun­tain was a spon­sor of our Spring ECM sem­i­nar series; this was the topic they addressed in the sem­i­nars. Reg­is­tra­tion is already open for the Fall Series:

Sep 14 2010 Atlanta, GA
Sep 16 2010 Wash­ing­ton, DC
Sep 22 2010 Toronto, ON
Sep 28 2010 Boston, MA
Sep 30 2010 New York, NY
Oct 5 2010 Min­neapo­lis, MN
Oct 7 2010 Chicago, IL

8 Rea­sons to Out­source Doc­u­ment Management

When con­fronted with infor­ma­tion man­age­ment chal­lenges, many orga­ni­za­tions oper­ate on a reac­tive basis—developing ad hoc solu­tions to spe­cific prob­lems as they arise. And because of this, many doc­u­ment man­age­ment pro­grams are rife with dupli­cate capa­bil­i­ties, non-standard approaches and process inef­fi­cien­cies. The result is that com­pa­nies are becom­ing exposed to unnec­es­sary risks and costs and miss­ing out on oppor­tu­ni­ties to add busi­ness value.

It’s time to take a step back and view infor­ma­tion man­age­ment as a crit­i­cal process on par with more tra­di­tional busi­ness oper­a­tions. But few orga­ni­za­tions have the time or exper­tise to build an infor­ma­tion man­age­ment pro­gram that meets today’s needs—and will be ready for what­ever the future holds.

That’s where work­ing with a knowl­edge­able part­ner and lever­ag­ing a hosted solu­tion can make a all the dif­fer­ence. They can help you quickly reach a new level of infor­ma­tion man­age­ment capa­bil­ity with­out a major up-front invest­ment in soft­ware, hard­ware and in-house skills.

Here are our top eight tips for get­ting your infor­ma­tion man­age­ment strat­egy and pro­gram back on track through the use of out­sourc­ing and hosted solutions.

1 — Avoid mak­ing a “plat­form deci­sion” at all.

The invest­ment in procur­ing and oper­at­ing a mod­ern, enterprise-class doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem is significant—and many solu­tions offer high-end fea­tures, such as work­flow, that few small and mid-size busi­nesses need.

Hosted doc­u­ment man­age­ment solu­tions offer a usage-based cost model that allows you to pay only for the ser­vices you need and the vol­ume you process. What’s more, since your part­ner is respon­si­ble for hard­ware and soft­ware upgrades and that cost is pro­rated across all orga­ni­za­tions using the ser­vice, you gain access to the lat­est and great­est with­out hav­ing to spend your lim­ited cap­i­tal funds.

2 — Get an expert to tame the paper monster.

The aver­age busi­ness pro­duces a mas­sive vol­ume of doc­u­ments, which makes locat­ing and retriev­ing vital records in a timely fash­ion a chal­lenge. In addi­tion, files are fre­quently orga­nized by non-standard index­ing schemes that do not sup­port enterprise-wide dis­cov­ery efforts.

A sin­gle source sup­plier for doc­u­ment man­age­ment solu­tions can help limit oper­a­tional and legal risks by holis­ti­cally man­ag­ing an organization’s infor­ma­tion assets. With doc­u­ment man­age­ment as their core busi­ness, these part­ners have seen and done it all—developing best prac­tices and exper­tise based on hun­dreds of cus­tomer engagements.

3 — Don’t wait to collaborate.

IDC esti­mates that the typ­i­cal enter­prise with 1,000 knowl­edge work­ers wastes $2.5 to $3.5 mil­lion per year search­ing for nonex­is­tent infor­ma­tion, fail­ing to find exist­ing infor­ma­tion or recre­at­ing infor­ma­tion that can’t be found. These esti­mates are sup­ported by other research that shows that pro­fes­sion­als spend 5 to 15 per­cent of their time read­ing infor­ma­tion, and up to 50 per­cent look­ing for it.

Hosted doc­u­ment man­age­ment solu­tions can be up and run­ning in a mat­ter of weeks, com­pared to the months it takes to eval­u­ate, pro­cure and install an in-house solu­tion. This speeds time to value, accel­er­ates deci­sion mak­ing and increases pro­duc­tiv­ity thanks to easy access to the infor­ma­tion work­ers need to do their jobs.

4 — Chain of cus­tody matters.

Main­tain­ing a strong chain of cus­tody for doc­u­ments is essen­tial to min­i­miz­ing busi­ness risk. With in-house doc­u­ment man­age­ment solu­tions, phys­i­cal records are often moved from off­site stor­age facil­i­ties to be scanned at another loca­tion and then returned for re-filing. Every step intro­duces an oppor­tu­nity for lost and improp­erly filed documents.

By choos­ing a sin­gle source provider for records stor­age and doc­u­ment man­age­ment solu­tions, chain of cus­tody risks are mit­i­gated. Phys­i­cal doc­u­ments can be retrieved, scanned and re-filed in a sin­gle loca­tion, so that the paper file never leaves the secu­rity of the vendor’s facil­ity. In addi­tion, document-level audit trails are main­tained, which can be extremely valu­able should your orga­ni­za­tion be required to pro­duce doc­u­ment his­to­ries as part of legal or reg­u­la­tory actions.

5 — Hybrid solu­tions “fuel” process efficiency.

Man­ag­ing doc­u­ments with unstruc­tured con­tent and in non-standard for­mats requires a level of cross-process coor­di­na­tion that con­sumes more busi­ness and infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy resources than most orga­ni­za­tions real­ize. With doc­u­ments stored in paper file cab­i­nets, record stor­age boxes in dis­trib­uted loca­tions or elec­tronic files in mul­ti­ple appli­ca­tions, this untamed stor­age envi­ron­ment makes rapid infor­ma­tion access a challenge.

A hybrid doc­u­ment man­age­ment solu­tion com­bines the cost-effectiveness of tra­di­tional paper stor­age for the bulk of your records, with the speed, con­ve­nience and cost-savings of dig­i­tal access. Files are kept in paper for­mat, but scanned and dig­i­tized on demand accord­ing to busi­ness needs. Only a single-source provider that offers phys­i­cal records stor­age and out­sourced doc­u­ment man­age­ment can offer the effi­ciency of this hybrid model.

6 — Arm knowl­edge work­ers with self-service tools.

In today’s find-it-yourself, search-engine-enabled world, employ­ees demand self-service doc­u­ment access and man­age­ment tools. As a result, the doc­u­ment man­age­ment specialist’s role has changed from records gate­keeper to an infor­ma­tion access coach or mentor.

As such, it’s impor­tant that dig­i­tal file access and man­age­ment be put in the hands of the end users—the peo­ple who know the doc­u­ments, their busi­ness uses and access require­ments. A hosted doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem must sup­port this need, with intel­li­gent scan­ning and image cap­ture fea­tures sup­ported by a dig­i­ti­za­tion process that addresses the require­ments for each doc­u­ment type. And as doc­u­ments are imaged, they should be made avail­able per your spe­cific requirements—via an FTP site, in an ECM-ready form or via a hosted repository.

7 — Cre­ate a plan that reflects best practices.

Few orga­ni­za­tions have the resources or exper­tise to create/overhaul their infor­ma­tion man­age­ment strat­egy and/or solu­tions. And with busi­nesses chal­lenged to do more with less, this com­plex task fre­quently falls to the bot­tom of the to-do list.

When out­sourced experts take care of doc­u­ment man­age­ment needs, com­pa­nies can rest easy know­ing that con­ver­sion process, reten­tion sched­ule, infor­ma­tion secu­rity and pri­vacy best prac­tices are being main­tained and con­sis­tently fol­lowed. This approach, with appro­pri­ate over­sight on your part, reduces the risk of com­pli­ance vio­la­tions and asso­ci­ated costs.

8 — Change doesn’t have to be difficult.

Chang­ing infor­ma­tion man­age­ment strat­egy and processes can be eas­ier than you imag­ine. An expe­ri­enced records man­age­ment part­ner, with years of multi-industry expe­ri­ence, can typ­i­cally address the com­plex­i­ties of a com­pre­hen­sive records man­age­ment strat­egy more effec­tively and cost-efficiently than your orga­ni­za­tion. And, at the same time, pro­vide a holis­tic solu­tion that will return sig­nif­i­cant addi­tional value because the com­po­nent pieces are capa­ble of work­ing together in a seam­less fash­ion while remov­ing any dupli­ca­tion of effort.

http://aiim.typepad.com/aiim_blog/2010/05/8-reasons-to-outsource-document-managementwhen-confronted-with-information-management-challenges-many-organizations-operate.html

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research