Over the years, the phrase ‘Paperless Office’ has become something of a distant dream to many businesses. Sure there are document management systems out there that will take your paper, read it, sort it and process it without human intervention, but such systems are usually very expensive and hard to justify. But once you’ve seen the big beasts, the rest seem to be something of a compromise. You don’t get all of the features, but you still need servers, software, training and someone to look after things, take backups, set up new users and filing systems. It’s a daunting task that many small and medium sized businesses look at and then run a mile from. The benefits really don’t outweigh the costs and effort in many situations. There has to be a better way…
In today’s world, a business is going backwards by standing still. Managing, controlling and reducing the paper that is received or generated in even the smallest office can produce significant benefits – tangible ones like saving storage space and intangible ones like being able to find the information you need more quickly, answering queries more efficiently and just feeling more in control of your daily routine.
The IT industry refers to as ‘Document Management’. I prefer to think of it as ‘Common Sense’ - we’re not talking about an all-encompassing system that controls every piece of paper within a business and tracks it, routes it and makes decisions on it. That kind of thing is overkill to many businesses – in fact, it often hinders the flexibility and adaptability that give smaller businesses an advantage over their bigger, less personal competitors.
What really makes a difference to most businesses is having a simple, useable filing system that can manage their paper and electronic documents easily, keeping them safe, secure and easily retrievable. Even a system like this can be relatively expensive, requiring investment in hardware, software and training, and there’s usually an ongoing annual support and maintenance cost, not to mention consultancy and setup fees.
That’s where online document archiving solutions come in. It’s different because the service provider will look after the system, the hardware, the backups, the security, the updates and the anti-virus, and all the users have to do is log in. By providing ‘Software as a Service’, all of the start up and ongoing management costs are eliminated, so it’s a far more cost-justifiable way of bringing document management to a business – a fixed monthly fee is much more comfortable to commit to than a hefty internal system would be.
I’ve been working in IT for twenty years, the last half of them in and around the world of document management, scanning, archiving and workflow. I’m now helping to take the whole document management and archiving process online with Instant Intelligence by Data Liberation (www.dataliberation.com) Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/information-technology-articles/the-paperless-office-whats-stopping-you-940061.html
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