The AIIM Blog
Keep your finger on the pulse of Intelligent Information Management with industry news, trends, and best practices.
Capture and Imaging | Document Management
As leading economic indicators continue to signal a global economic slowdown, companies are looking for practical steps to take – such as lowering costs and streamlining operations – in order to weather the storm and achieve a competitive edge in the eventual recovery. At the same time, recent industry research shows that businesses also want to be more environmentally responsible. There are several document management practices that can help companies reach both their environmental and cost-reduction goals. From the sustainability perspective, these practices can significantly reduce the use of paper, thereby saving trees, gas in shipping the paper, physical space to store it, and halting the eventual destruction of many files that end up in a landfill. According to the Environmental Paper Network, “If, for example, the United States cut its office paper use by roughly 10 percent, or 540,000 tons, greenhouse gases would fall by 1.6 million tons. This is the equivalent of taking 280,000 cars off the road for a year.”
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Document Management | Enterprise Content Management (ECM) | Sharepoint and Office 365
Saving money is the most significant current driver. Compared to recent years, cost-saving has taken a clear lead over compliance as the primary business driver for investments in document and records management. Tracking the most significant business drivers over a number of years shows regulatory control and associated compliance risk peaking in 2007 with a fall back in the last two years to cost savings. This is obviously due to the economic downturn - which was in part caused by insufficient regulatory control. We feel that compliance and risk avoidance may rise again once the dust settles over the many regulatory lapses and forced mergers.
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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.
Capture and Imaging | Document Management
Not every document management company has the expertise and flexibility to meet your firm's needs. Follow these guidelines to choose a document scanning and document management service provider that will help your company operate more efficiently, improve your bottom line and strengthen your competitive position; now and as you plan for growth in the future.
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You are not too small for Document Management. Size doesn’t matter; the junk drawer in your kitchen is just as big a headache as the pile of boxes in your garage. Not addressing document management means you are likely to fail at some point to find the right information for the job. It also means you might be paying to keep information you no longer need. If you’re big enough to get sued, you’re big enough to be forced into e-discovery. If you plan to stay in business, you are going to have new employees at some point. Document Management addresses all these issues.
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Not all SMBs are the same. I work for an insurance company with about 30 people, but we are more like an insurance company than we are like most 30-person organizations. We have Accounting, Underwriting, Claims, Loss Control, IT -- all the things you would expect to find in an insurance company. The nature of our business simply allows us to function with a small staff. On the other hand, we are not enough like an insurance company to find value in the marketing materials you give to large insurance companies. If you want to market to us, you’re just going to have to get to know us. In many cases, given the amount of effort you (vendors) have to make for the limited amount of sales we can provide, it seems like you aren’t really interested. Or, you are only interested when the economy is bad – I’m hearing from a lot of interested vendors today.
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I was thinking at last week's AIIM roadshow about the ingredients that enter into an effective document strategy. Here are my Ten Commandments. They are in no particular order, except the first one is intentionally first (kind of like the real Ten Commandments).
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