News
Active solutions – building a bridge between the physical and the digital
September 2007 by By Julia Daehne, Product Marketing Manager, Iron Mountain UK
The one-size-fits-all approach to document management is nothing more than a production line, where customers can be left feeling like pre-processed packages: off the shelf the ‘solutions’ fail to address specific needs and businesses should not have to adapt to accommodate them. Excellent document management is an active process – not a passive one – where the solution is informed by and adapts to the business it is integrating with. By actively exploring each business and what its unique requirements are, document management can become a strategic partner, creating and adapting solutions that will help business grow.
To the company board document management all too often seems like a necessary evil instead of a strategic tool. This is hardly surprising; data storage and management can be expensive, difficult, and can lead to costly litigation if it’s not done right. Too often it just doesn’t appear to be directly related to core business.
So how do intelligent data management companies turn this around and deliver? The answer is deceptively simple: turn the problems discussed on their head. Document management should take away the difficulty and the pain, be cost effective and ensure companies stay out of trouble when it comes to using information. Finally – and this is really important – proof is needed that information can work for businesses, be a driver rather than a drag.
Let’s get active by unbundling some of the more traditional document management solutions to see how they can be adapted to better suit businesses. Appropriately, perhaps, one of the ways to do this is to see how use of active and semi active documents can be improved.
This has long been a no-go area for storage and management solutions – fear of placing valuable and confidential information in the hands of a third party drives the belief that documents that are in use need to stay on-site. Although apparently unavoidable, this causes problems because valuable storage space needs to be set aside, document tracking needs to be handled in-house, legislation expertise must be added to job descriptions and staff members still have to spend their expensive time seeking out documents that have been lost within the system.
Software storage packages can be expensive to buy, with high license and implementation costs, and wholesale in-house scanning projects are often lengthy and painful exercises. But the reality is that not all documents need to be scanned because not all are needed regularly – some are, but many are not. One of the first tasks is to explore what kind of ‘active’ documents are being dealt with – or to put it another way, discover the file’s active lifecycle. How often is it used? How many concurrent users need to access it? Does it need to be held in physical form, can it be electronic or can it be both?
Iron Mountain is different in that it works to build a bridge between physical and digital files, creating a fully integrated document solution to better manage your hybrid storage environment.
Take a file which is deemed to be active and required to be physical and onsite – an HR file for an existing employee for example. It is undeniably active but there may not be a requirement for it to be regularly retrieved. So it sits in an in-house filing cabinet, taking up premium space, requiring resource 365 days a year even though it may rarely be accessed. By using the Iron Mountain open shelf document management service combined with image on demand retrieval, a business can outsource the storage of their active physical HR files without the need to scan each and every one of them. If the file is needed it can be retrieved and either delivered physically or scanned and delivered electronically. As well as greater flexibility, this offers real cost savings as scanning is only undertaken on demand and in-house storage costs are cut out.
The flexibility offered by the seamless hybrid approach opens up an almost limitless scope for variation, which can be used to tailor solutions to each company’s unique requirements. Businesses can: move their entire active physical file library offsite; move parts of the library; have parts of the library scanned; opt for scanning on demand; or any combination that suits them.
Companies that need improved accessibility whilst maintaining data security can convert the desired paper documents into an electronic format and store them in Iron Mountain’s hosted Digital Record Centre. This allows remote access to vital documents at any time from any place. In essence, the customer has access to a secure and managed vault of documents, with control over who can view them completely in their own hands.
For those businesses that have active documents that really do not want to outsource – owing to confidentiality issues for example – the control, convenience and reliability of electronic retrieval can be replicated. By using external document management expertise onsite and the use of barcoding, it is possible to offer secure, reliable and cost-effective document administration with search and retrieval as fast as it is accurate.
Businesses are moving fast, as are their information needs, and so document management providers must stay ahead of the game. By actively taking the time to see what is needed and tailoring solutions to suit, providers can evolve new systems that reflect individual company requirements – and forge enduring partnerships with customers who value the strategic benefits of document management.
