No Reward For Capture?

Recently, I was sent a link to this blog by Daniel Chalef on active document capture. He references an AIIM article where survey respondents rate their success or failure with quality and vendors. Both resources are well worth reading and available to the public. The blog discusses strategic ways to achieve an organizational benefit with document capture. There are a few practical examples I wanted to share.

What active documents do organizations still get in paper form? A frightening array, including contracts (from sales to loan applications), invoices and billing statements, checks, etc. Any of these document types can be electronic, and they probably all will be, all the time, sometime in the future. While we're holding our breath, it's a good idea to look at how we might treat all this paper.

Scan those contracts and make them part of whatever project, real estate deal, or program they relate to. While you might limit access to management, your intranet should be the place to hold those documents. Someone has to ensure the appropriate terms of service, and that's pretty easy to do with a searchable scanned file. Invoices can be scanned and presented directly in your accounting system, especially if your organization receives a number of the same invoices from the same contractors. You can even set up a field recognition feature to present the dollar amount right in the system, with the scan attached to the contractor record for reference. Checks should also be scanned and added to your accounts payable records.

So what do you do with the paper? Get rid of it... sometime. There are federal, state, municipal, industry, and organizational rules about that, and not every stakeholder treats scans as an approved substitute. That being said, as a rule of thumb, I would suggest that your paper documents have no practical use after the following fiscal year. In other words, paper files you received and scanned in 2009 can probably go away in 2011 without much fuss. Just make sure you take good care of your scans.

OGI DIY OMG

I try to be handy around the house. I can do some of the smaller projects like faucet replacement, running electrical circuits, and the like. I had limited success with room renovation, so I started hiring experts. OK, I really messed up one project, and I had to get outside help. Despite my setbacks, I found that my experience with small projects helped me evaluate contractors and help with planning and technical decisions. I could understand the need for prep work, and I usually knew why things were done in a certain order.

Why am I spending valuable pixels talking about home projects? My experience as a homeowner seems very similar to what some high-level IT folks in the federal government are discovering with document management. In last week's entry, I mentioned how one department was clearly taking on a monumental conversion project with untrained staff and inadequate equipment. Instead of meeting the demands of the administration, the department has implemented a solution that's a couple orders of magnitude below what's needed. In the mighty triad of money, quality, and time, they have chosen low money, no quality, and infinite time.

What this department will find, as I did, is that doing it once the right way is a lot cheaper, faster, and better than doing it twice. It's even better than doing it once and being totally unsatisfied. Once again, putting the benefit ahead of the means can save a lot of headache. I'm a big fan of experts. I can't always take their advice, but I have modified my plans many times based on the knowledge that comes from their profession. I hope this department, and others like it, will solicit advice on document management from experts like, well, me. It's not rocket science, and if it is, that's what rocket scientists are for.