The AIIM Blog
Keep your finger on the pulse of Intelligent Information Management with industry news, trends, and best practices.
Electronic Records Management (ERM) | Retention
All too often, businesses discover the need for a document retention policy either when it is least convenient to implement or too late in the game. Particularly in today’s litigious environment where virtually any form of information (paper, electronic, or audio) can be used in litigation, being proactive in this regard can save an organization from headaches and high costs. An organizational retention policy provides for the systematic review, retention, and destruction of information and records received or created in the course of business. Below are eight items to consider when developing your company’s retention policy.
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Capture and Imaging | Document Management
"Should I buy or rent OCR capabilities?" This is a common question businesses ask themselves when they're starting to get serious about their capture strategy. If you're wondering if you should purchase a document management application for your data extraction and forms processing or outsource the job to a service bureau, the answer is a dissatisfying "Well, it depends." Answering this question should include making a solid business case that includes a cost-benefit analysis using a formula like Net Present Value (NPV) or Internal Rate of Return (IRR) to determine the return on investment. However, the answer usually comes down to the company's philosophy of building versus renting. The renting companies believe in focusing on their core competency and reducing costs while outsourcing anything that falls outside core functions. The building companies are often more focused on maintaining control. The following should be considered in terms of answering the in-house vs. outsourcing question for your organization. Here are eight things you should consider when deciding to buy or rent OCR capabilities:
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Making an ECM implementation successful requires planning and attention to detail. The best way to create the right solution is to identify organizational goals and priorities. Learn how to manage a successful implementation in our free guide.
Electronic Records Management (ERM) | Enterprise Content Management (ECM) | Information Governance
Before getting started with an implementation, and way before moving onto the eight secrets, it is useful to recall why you are considering a content or records management implementation in the first place and to confirm there's a commitment to proceed. This kind of "strategic mobilization" should kick off any ECM or ERM project. To do this effectively, organizations should gather sponsors and stakeholders, identify the team that will lead the project, understand what the vision of the sponsor of the project is, and understand where significant gaps are likely to arise.
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Archiving | Email Management | eDiscovery
Have a well defined and detailed calculated business case. Organizations are facing various challenges to take back control and unlock the business value of content, especially in emails. Four challenges drive the business case for email management: Archive email and content for storage space management to reduce operational costs introduced by the increasing volume and size of emails and multiple formats of content types Manage email and content for legal obligations to comply with different rules and regulations which create duties of evidence and documentation, facilitate eDiscovery, or indicate supervision and monitoring for non-compliance Combine email and content to other loosely managed content to minimize risks caused by increased organizational scale and complexity, changed speed and style of communication, lost knowledge. Manage email and content to gain efficiency. Associate email and content to processes and business applications to accelerate business processes
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Electronic Records Management (ERM) | Enterprise Content Management (ECM) | Sharepoint and Office 365
1. Determine SharePoint’s role in the organization. For some companies, SharePoint is the chosen collaboration and social networking engine, where all collaborative content resides in SharePoint. For others, SharePoint is more of an end-user experience and Intranet platform. If you are implementing SharePoint with another ECM solution, it's critical to identify what role SharePoint will truly have in your organization to ensure proper planning for the implementation. There are several features within SharePoint that need to be taken into consideration before you implement. For example: What aspects of the Microsoft Office integration are or will be deployed? What areas of overlap exist between SharePoint and the ECM solution? Will SharePoint be the primary access point for all content or one of multiple access points? What vendor integration capabilities are provided? How does SharePoint fit into the corporate records management program? The more that can be identified before the deployment, the lower the implementation costs will be. The project charter should identify the reasoning behind the decision to combine the technologies.
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Hailed as the way in which we can breathe life into our static, paper documents, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has made strides in the recent decades – becoming a staple module in just about every software package managing documents - From Nuance’s PaperPort to EMC’s Documentum. OCR itself can mean various things. Wikipedia offers this definition: "… the mechanical or electronic translation of images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text (usually captured by a scanner) into machine-editable text (2008)." While many estimate the accuracy levels for OCR engines can reach 98 or 99 percent, it has been my experience this is very difficult to achieve in most commercially-available software suites for the small-to-medium businesses (SMBs). Many variables can affect the accuracy levels of output, ranging from document condition to readability.
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