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Pandemic Producing Piles of Paper – How COVID-19 is Driving a Transformation to Digital Content

by | Nov 30, 2021

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, nearly all companies and organizations were abruptly forced to transition portions of, and in many cases, their entire workforce, to remote work.  It seems that many companies have adjusted to this “new normal” and settled in, albeit with some lingering technical and connectivity issues.

Others, however, are faced with the challenge of accessing information received and kept as hardcopy and not digitally, often as a result of outdated records management and information governance policies. As companies raced to get their employees up and running remotely, ingestion of hardcopy documents into the process stream became a challenge in this “new norm.”

What was done with the mail? Was it bundled up and mailed again or scanned and emailed to the recipient? (Is Outlook your system of record?!) Or, scanned and sent to a workflow for transparent processing? How many tubs of mail are stacked up waiting for someone to go through them?

How does historical documentation get distributed to everyone who can and/or should use the lessons learned in them?  Does everyone get emailed a copy or is there a digital version in a system of record available for everyone?

How are your research and development teams accessing information or original art from prior teams’ work?  Is all your research digitized or only that which led to funding?

Do you have the necessary subject matter experts to map out? Here’s a checklist:

 

Day-Forward Document Capture 

  • Email & website (even fax) ingestion?

 

Capture Services

  • Backfile conversion
  • Scheduled pick-ups
  • Searchable content

 

Workflow Design

  • Internal review and approvals
  • External requests for information or action

 

Digital Distribution

  • Is the mail piling up?
  • Losing important documents?

 

Indexing

  • OCR/ICR Technology
  • Contextual Recognition
  • Database verification

 

Archival Strategy

  • Where does everything go?

 

Storage & Retrieval

  • Can you find what you need, when you need it?

 

Business Continuity & Recovery 

  • Are you ready for the unexpected?
  • Were you prepared when COVID-19 hit?

 

Migration Strategy 

  • Do you know what data needs to be migrated and why?

 

Western Integrated Systems clients do!

 

Written by WIS

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