Will there ever be a Paperless Office?

Posted on Feb 28, 2011 in Records Management News

This was my answer to a blog Post by Stephanie Jones on the Records man­age­ment Group Blog … Mon­day Feb­ru­ary 28, 2011

What a great ques­tion Stephanie!

As you may know I have assisted in the devel­op­ment of more than 500 Com­mer­cial Records Cen­ters and have trained more than 1500 Sales Reps in RIM Ser­vices. AND do I have an opin­ion after 34 years in the com­mer­cial side of the business.

We have come a long way since Iron Moun­tain had two offices in the early 1980’s. There were less than 100 CRC’s in the world at the time ACRC (now PRISM Inter­na­tional) was formed as the com­mer­cial records trade association.My com­pany was among the first 100 or so to join when we started in 1982.

I have been an OBSERVER of the indus­try for more than 34 years. This is my answer to your question.

Today records and doc­u­ments are mov­ing to dig­i­tal at “light speed” yet paper con­tin­ues to grow. The CRC indus­try has con­tin­ued to grow in the hard-copy stor­age and ser­vices and will con­tinue for the fore­see­able future. They have also adapted into more dig­i­tal ser­vices and they con­tinue to MORPH.

The first arti­cle about the paper­less office was writ­ten in 1982 and that is nearly 30 years ago. Peter Drucker wrote about the Knowl­edge Soci­ety in about the year 2000 in his land­mark works “Man­ag­ing for the Future and The Post Cap­i­tal­ist Soci­ety”. Abi­gail J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper wrote the much quoted study 10 years ago in Novem­ber 2001.

It appears that all of these were right.

The arti­cle was the first of thou­sand and gave rise to the huge indus­try of hard­ware, soft­ware, con­nec­tiv­ity and sup­port that we have today. Drucker wrote as a futur­ist when he said that it was a true Par­a­digm Shift that will take about 50 years this is very quick when you com­pare the Knowl­edge Soci­ety to the Indus­trial Soci­ety and the Agri­cul­tural Soci­ety that took hun­dreds or even thou­sand of years to unfold. When Drucker wrote this he said we are “smack dab in the mid­dle of it” and I for one I believe that he was right. Sell­ers and Harper study revealed that we would not even begin to be paper­less until we are able to make the char­ac­ter­is­tics of dig­i­tal equal to the char­ac­ter­is­tics of paper. With the iPad, iPod, iPhone, and the iAny­thing I think we are very close to that prediction.

Will it hap­pen tomor­row? … Absolutely not!

The dri­ving forces are Cost and Speed and the Integrity of the Cloud.

Like med­ical records one appli­ca­tion at a time will fall to a mix of paper and dig­i­tal but it will take some time for it all to unfold. An we still have the archive of the past which for the most part is paper. There are as best that I can count eleven pri­vate equity com­pa­nies buy­ing com­mer­cial records cen­ters and other RIM ser­vices com­pa­nies for the dig­i­tal ser­vices to cross sell. They buy CRC’s for the annu­ity rev­enue of stor­age and as a plat­form for the future of their own array of dig­i­tal services.

There I have said it. That’s my opin­ion and I am stick­ing to it.

Cary McGov­ern
FileMan

4 Steps to Going Paperless

Posted on Oct 5, 2010 in Records Management News

Posted by ready steady print on 5 Octo­ber, 2010
This item was filled under [ Solopreneurs ]

“We want to show our cus­tomers that we’re fol­low­ing an environmentally-friendly approach.” “There’s no more room for all the paper in our offices and we’re mis­plac­ing files all the time.” There are numer­ous rea­sons to go paper­less. The ques­tion is where to begin. A paper­less future may seem like a long ways away, but there are some con­crete steps to start you down the path.

Step 1: Get Con­trol of Your Paper Records
The first step to going paper­less is tak­ing con­trol of your paper records. This means hav­ing full insight into your paper in inven­tory, what infor­ma­tion they con­tain, what their reten­tion poli­cies are and exe­cut­ing on those poli­cies accord­ingly. It also means under­stand­ing your orga­ni­za­tions’ usage of these records, how often they are accessed, and stream­lin­ing deliv­ery and stor­age costs.

Going paper­less begins by remov­ing the file cab­i­nets and stor­age rooms that take up valu­able office space. Hav­ing records in-house may seem com­fort­ing, but the truth is it is usu­ally the least effec­tive way to man­age paper records. The cost of real-estate to store the records and the time it takes for some­one to find the infor­ma­tion they need far out­weighs the ben­e­fits of in-house records man­age­ment. Also, with­out a good records man­age­ment sys­tem, this type of stor­age is also prone to lost and mis­filed doc­u­ments, effect­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity and expos­ing your orga­ni­za­tion to com­pli­ance and legal issues.

An effec­tive way of gain­ing con­trol over paper records is to lever­age a busi­ness records stor­age provider. By uti­liz­ing a stor­age provider, com­pa­nies reduce the risk of loss and dam­age to vital records, ensure reg­u­la­tory com­pli­ance, increase records retrieval effi­ciency, and pro­tect con­fi­den­tial­ity and secu­rity. All of this is accom­plished while reduc­ing the costs asso­ci­ated with records stor­age, retrieval and maintenance.

Step 2: Access Paper Records Dig­i­tally
The next step in the paper­less chase is to enable vir­tual file deliv­ery of your records in stor­age. This approach deliv­ers your paper-based file col­lec­tion as an image so that it is instantly acces­si­ble to autho­rized users. The best part is the cost model – by only request­ing the files for Vir­tual File Deliv­ery when the infor­ma­tion is needed, you ben­e­fit from match­ing expen­di­tures with imme­di­ate value. Large-scale back file con­ver­sions are some­times needed, but should be the excep­tion and not the norm, as they can be costly and time consuming.

In a Vir­tual File Deliv­ery sce­nario, users search for the files to be retrieved from stor­age, and rather than request phys­i­cal deliv­ery, they ask for a dig­i­tal copy. This allows for near imme­di­ate access to the doc­u­ment, elim­i­nates the paper from com­ing into the com­pany and reduces emis­sions since the num­ber of van deliv­er­ies is reduced.

Step 3: Use Dig­i­tal Doc­u­ments as Part of Oper­a­tions
Vir­tual File Deliv­ery is the right approach for mov­ing to paper­less when only occa­sional access to files is needed. For more fre­quent access to infor­ma­tion, the next step is to imple­ment a Vir­tual File Room, which pro­vides instant access to business-critical infor­ma­tion through the Web. Sim­i­lar to a phys­i­cal file room, a Vir­tual File Room pro­vides struc­tured stor­age and retrieval of crit­i­cal busi­ness doc­u­ments. How­ever, it also adds the extra ben­e­fits of quickly search­ing and retriev­ing doc­u­ments based on key­words, pro­vid­ing backup and secu­rity, and uti­liz­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion tools, increas­ing effi­ciency through­out a busi­ness process.

When tak­ing advan­tage of a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solu­tion, Vir­tual File Rooms are cost-efficient and elim­i­nate the large up-front invest­ments in infra­struc­ture often needed to get a solu­tion up and run­ning. This approach enables you to out­source the “paper prob­lem” while retain­ing con­trol of the “busi­ness solution.”

The Vir­tual File Room makes it pos­si­ble for depart­ments or entire enter­prises to quickly begin man­ag­ing con­tent to increase effi­ciency and free resources for higher value tasks that increase rev­enue and enhance cus­tomer service.

Step 4: Imple­ment Imag­ing and Work­flow Automa­tion
The ulti­mate goal for a com­pany going paper­less is to imple­ment an imag­ing and work­flow solu­tion. Orga­ni­za­tions are able to con­vert paper into dig­i­tal images, store them in a Web-enabled repos­i­tory for rapid retrieval, route them using exist­ing busi­ness rules, and extract data from them to enhance pro­cess­ing. This removes the paper from tra­di­tion­ally paper-intensive processes while stream­lin­ing work­flows to improve productivity.

Going Paper­less at Your Pace
The var­i­ous depart­ments within an orga­ni­za­tion have dif­fer­ent records man­age­ment require­ments, and have dif­fer­ent paper­less ini­tia­tives. While every depart­ment and com­pany can­not go paper­less at the same time or pace, they can cer­tainly remove paper by tak­ing advan­tage of tech­nol­ogy to make doc­u­ment man­age­ment more accu­rate and effi­cient. That’s why it’s so impor­tant to find a provider that under­stands this chal­lenge and pro­vides a com­plete solu­tion –one that can part­ner with you on your path to paper­less, at your pace.

Com­pli­ments of File­man Research

How Paperless Are You?

Posted on Jul 31, 2010 in Records Management News

As I printed out an indus­try arti­cle on busi­ness records stor­age to read, I real­ized that I’m not doing my part in help­ing the com­pany go paper­less. Sure, we offer paper­less solu­tions, but it didn’t hit home how much paper I waste until read­ing AIIM’s report 8 Rea­sons You Need a Strat­egy for Man­ag­ing Infor­ma­tion – Before It’s Too Late (www. AIIM.org/8 things):

There are over 4 tril­lion paper doc­u­ments in the U.S., grow­ing at a rate of 22% per year

For 56% of orga­ni­za­tions, the vol­ume of paper records is increasing

The aver­age office worker uses 10,000 sheets of copy paper each year and wastes about 1,410 of these pages

With the aver­age cost of each wasted page being about six cents, a com­pany with 500 employ­ees could be spend­ing $42,000 per year on wasted prints
Then I looked around on my desk to see just exactly how much paper I use. From print­ing out arti­cles and proofs to Web pages and specs, I con­tribute to the waste. I guess I’m still so used to hav­ing impor­tant infor­ma­tion in my hands that I never stopped hit­ting the print but­ton. Now I have to get used to hav­ing that infor­ma­tion just on my desktop.

So as my com­pany helps tran­si­tion other orga­ni­za­tions to the paper­less future, I also have to do my part. I’ve already switched to paper­less state­ments and bills at home, but it’s time to do the same at work. Feel free to share your ideas for going paper­less as well.

For More Infor­ma­tion: http://blog.archivesystems.com/records-management-services/?&tag=business%20records%20storage

Craig Abram­son
Online Mar­ket­ing Man­ager
Archive Sys­tems, Inc.
Chang­ing the Way the World Man­ages Documents

Com­pli­ments of File­Man Research