Most organizations do not consider themselves to be in the document business. Nevertheless, documents are really a second venture for nearly all organizations. Everyday, documents drive the business functions that make any company run. Marketing, accounting, human resources, manufacturing, shipping, facilities, customer service, research and development, sales—these are just a few essential business functions that depend on documents as crucial components of the process. Imagine your organization without documents . . . how would you survive?

How well we manage our documents has a lot to do with how well we manage our businesses. Did you ever have a document that you knew you had somewhere; you needed it right now, but couldn’t find it? Do you have documents overflowing in your storeroom, scattered around people’s desks, or filed in an off-site location? Do you have access to an original contract, but can’t find the emails that went back and fourth with addendums attached?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, now is the time to examine how digital document management (DM) can make your organization more efficient and effective.

The Convergence of Paper and Digital Documents
We use a variety of documents every day. Over thirty billion original documents are used each year in the United States, yet, despite the onset of paperless technology, many key documents are still produced and used in paper form. For most organizations computer printouts, photocopies, and fax transmissions are still a predominant part of many core business functions. Even sticky notes can be important players in the corporate paper push. As a result, a majority of workers—from the basement to the boardroom—continue to struggle to manage ever-growing piles of paper.

We also work with a variety of digital documents. In the course of each business day, Americans send and receive well over 2.2 billion email messages. Documents created in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are an invariable part of office procedure. Even graphic files like PDF and TIFF have become routine to all but the most neophyte computer user. As a result, many digital documents have taken a place alongside their paper counterparts as ubiquitous citizens of business workflow. These electronic documents are often, ironically, printed on paper in order for them to be filed and stored.

The disparity between paper and digital documents continues to become less distinct. For corporate workers, the much-ballyhooed convergence of paper and digital documents is now a reality; one that is experienced by everyone who has ever struggled to find an important document or a set of related documents, and was not quite sure where any of them were located.

The Cost of Document Mis-Management
Organizations must adopt a DM strategy if for no other reason than the current exponential growth of information. More information has been produced in the last 30 years than in the previous five thousand—the entire history of civilization. What’s more, that body of information is expected to double in less than five years. With over 90 percent of corporate information contained in documents, it is clear that whatever the medium—pixels or paper, bytes or birch bark—documents are costing corporations more than ever before. Consider the following statistics:

- The cost of documents to corporate America is estimated to reach as much as 15 percent of annual corporate revenue.

- Documents claim up to 60 percent of office workers’ time and account for up to 45 percent of labor costs.

- For every dollar that a company spends for a final document, ten dollars are spent to manage the process.

These are just a few of the statistics that describe the growing expense of document mismanagement. The need for a more strategic approach is clearly evident in research from respected analysts like Gartner Group, IDC, and Cap Ventures. The trouble is that when most people think of DM they tend to think only in terms of output costs. However, this is only part of the total cost equation. Expenses for ink, paper, toner, maintenance, etc. comprise only about 10 percent of the total document-related costs for most organizations. The other 90 percent is quietly spent by workers looking for documents, updating documents, filing documents, recreating lost documents, reusing documents, etc. Expense associated with the physical warehousing, distribution, and obsolescence of documents is often a given, while the corporate risk associated with records archive, regulatory compliance, and litigation discovery can be exorbitantly costly yet mostly unrecognized. Customer satisfaction can suffer if your agents can’t find customer documents quickly and completely.

The Rising Tide of Paper and Digital Documents
But, what about the unpromising notion of the paperless office? The fact is that the Information Age is actually powering a boom in paper. Since 1984—the dawn of the personal computer—the number of pages printed by American companies has grown by 500 percent to over 1.5 trillion pages per year. This equates to a mountain of paper 6,500 times taller than Mount Everest.

In 1995, only about 10 percent of documents were presented in digital form. Analysts indicate a trend toward an eventual decline in paper documents to about 30 percent of total by the end of next year. It is important to note that the predicted growth of information rises considerably over the same time period. As a result, the number of printed pages will actually double by 2005 . . . and double again by 2010.

As a result, converting paper documents into scanned digital images is often regarded as the primary value of DM. The truly exciting benefit is the ability to merge the worlds of paper and digital documents into one. Imagine, for instance, the ability to link the scanned images of your paper files (formerly copies, printouts, and faxes) with key digital documents (e.g., Word, Excel, email) and access them instantly via your PC. DM can unify document types that hitherto were worlds apart.

Key Aspects of DM
There are two key aspects to consider when designing a DM strategy: Capture and Access. It is important to understand these functions and how their interaction can affect the value and benefits found using DM.

There are two types of capture to consider when designing a DM strategy: Image Capture and Data Capture. When you scan a paper document (versus making a copy) you literally capture a digital image of that document. Scanning paper documents and capturing images in lieu of printing or copying is at the core of eliminating all those dusty and bulky filing cabinets. For some small offices or departments, scanning and saving digital images in TIFF or PDF format may be a big improvement over the paperbound way of managing documents.

Storing a large number of scanned images can become overwhelming and will quickly fill up your hard drive or server storage. Once stored, finding image files can be cumbersome and time consuming. Imagine searching for a specific document months or years after you first created and saved it. Will you remember exactly how it was named or where it was stored? For busy users, clicking through multiple folders in Windows Explorer is often more costly and time consuming than searching through old school file drawers of retention boxes.

For DM to provide its promised efficiency, the second type of capture comes into play: Data Capture. In order to quickly search for and easily retrieve documents no matter where they are stored or how they have been named, capturing data about each document is essential. Key bits of information, like customer name, account number, date or amount paid, are found on most documents. Using data capture, you can automatically glean this information at the time you scan a document and retain the captured data as index fields, also known as metadata. This metadata is then married to your scanned image and will enable a variety of searches, or queries. For example, a company can find all training documents by date range, every invoice for a specific part number, or shipping slips for a specific carrier.

This query function provides immediate access to your documents electronically, and is a much better approach than pawing through forgotten boxes in the basement. The key is to minimize the cost of capturing data and maximize the access to your documents. Simply scanning documents to a file folder, then manually entering the metadata into fields on a PC can actually result in an increase in labor and expense. Using data capture to automate this process by reading pre-set areas on a page (via Optical Character Recognition) and auto-populating the index fields can dramatically reduce the cost of capturing this valuable metadata.

Lack of a Document Strategy Costs You
Metadata and data capture can seem esoteric. To better understand the real-world implications, consider a recent Price Waterhouse study that conducted a search of over 10,000 documents looking for a specific topic, author, and data range. A manual search of paper files performed by a staff of paralegals took 67 hours and found 15 documents. The same search, performed using a digital DM system, required 4.5 seconds and found 20 documents. The time differential between 67 hours and 4.5 seconds is compelling, but many corporate managers will be more concerned about the five documents that were missed in the manual search. Consider the following statistics:

- 90 percent of documents handled daily in the workplace are still on paper

- 15 percent of documents are misplaced

- 30 percent of the workday is spent searching for information

If firms are not competitive in using the information they have within their enterprise, they will be less able to face the competitive pressures of changing markets, shrinking margins, and increasing competition. Companies must have information agility in order to effectively react to dynamic changes in their marketplace. DM provides just such agility by enabling users to search for and retrieve information when they need it to process work, satisfy customers, or to make critical business decisions.

Building a good DM strategy can increase the value of your other infrastructure investments like printers, copiers, scanners, and networks. Spending on information technology now accounts for over one-half of the United States’ gross investment in equipment. It has been estimated that U.S. businesses spend more than 100 billion dollars on hardware alone. Documents are a vehicle that can turn the expense of information technology into an asset. They represent one aspect of information processing that can be quantifiably measured and improved.

Who Uses DM?
If you think that DM systems are monolithic, expensive, and complicated, think again. Often, organizations can implement a department-scale system for less than the cost of hiring another staff member or bringing in a new printer or copier. Organizations of all sizes, industries, and scale are making the transition to DM. Here are some quick industry verticals and applications to consider:

- Education: Student Records, Certifications, Accreditation

- Medical: Patient Records, HCFA forms, HIPPA compliance

- Transportation: Proof of Delivery, Bills of Lading, Inventory

- Legal: Client Records, Case Reports, Discovery Compliance

- Insurance: Claims, Applications, Damage Inspections

- Government: Police Dept. Records, Parking Tickets, Historical Records