Join the AIIM paper-free pledge
Blog: Column 2 - Sandy Kemsley
AIIM recently posted about the World Paper-Free Day on November 6th, and although I’m not sure that it’s recognized as a national holiday or anything, it’s certainly a good idea. I blogged almost three years ago about my mostly paperless office, and how to achieve such a thing yourself. Since that time, I’ve added an Epson DS-510 scanner, which has a nice small footprint and a sheet feeder; it sits right on my desk and there is never a backlog of scanning.
It’s not just about scanning and shredding, although those are pretty important activities: you have to have a proper retention plan that adheres to any regulatory requirements, and a secure offsite (cloud or otherwise) backup capability to ameliorate any physical site disasters.
You also need to consider how much backfile conversion that you’ll do: I decided to back-scan everything except my financial records at the time that I started going completely paperless, then scan everything including financials from that date forward. Each year, another batch of old paper financial records reached their destruction date and were shredded, the last of them just last year, and I no longer have any paper files. If back-scanning is too time-consuming for you but you want to start scanning everything day-forward, then store your old paper files by destruction date so that you can easily shred the batch of expired files each year until there are none left.
These things – scanning, document destruction, retention plan, secure backup, backfile conversion – are the same things that I’ve dealt with at large enterprise customers in the past on ECM projects, just on a small-office scale.
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