Digital Landfill

10 Excuses Not to Consider Document Management This Year

“New Year's Day…now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”
--Mark Twain

 Ahhhh.  We're only two months into the year and already all those resolutions are fading.  According to numerous web sites, one of the most popular resolutions each year is to “lose weight.”  This is true.  In fact I personally make this resolution every single year without fail.  And almost immediately I come with all sorts of interesting excuses to abandon this resolution.  Among them:  1) I like the taste of beer; 2) I like bread; 3) I like pasta; and 4) Did I mention I like beer?

So if your organization has been thinking about finally embarking on that long-postponed document management resolution, let me save you the effort.  Based on my conversations with many organizations, here is a handy-dandy top 10 list of excuses to give to your management to help them avoid getting serious about document management during the coming year.  Why struggle with the guilt of information management systems that you know are nothing more than a glorified digital landfill?  Help your management quickly find the proper excuses to avoid cleaning up the digital landfill!

John’s Handy-Dandy Top 10 Excuses for Management to Avoid Document Management

1. If we need to, we can usually find it.  We usually can find the information we need when a customer calls.  Sometimes it takes a while, but once we send out an email to all staff asking for the information, it usually shows up after a bit.
2. No one will ever sue us.  Who would ever want to sue us?   I’m sure if push comes to shove we could find whatever we need to defend ourselves.  Let’s not go looking for problems.
3. We’ve got to pick our battles.  Even if it’s true that organizations typically spend $20 in labor to file a document, $120 in labor to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labor to reproduce a lost document, it’s chump change to us.  We have much bigger costs to worry about.
4. Green/schmeen.  Who cares if the average document is photocopied 19 times?  Not my problem.  I’ve got more important things to worry about.
5. It’s good for staff to be busy.  We understand that professionals can spend up to 50% of their time looking for the right information.  That’s what we pay them for.
6. It’s easier to just get everyone together in person.  If my staff needs to work together on a project, we find it more productive to send everybody a draft in advance and then have everyone fly in for a few days and sit together with all of the different versions and just hammer out the details.  Plus everyone likes staying in hotels and having nice dinners.
7. Our business isn’t located on a flood plain or anything.  Sure when we see all those paper documents floating around after a flood on the news, we feel bad for those people.  But we’re not located in a place where disasters happen.
8. Information security just isn’t at the top of our list.  Yes, we lock the doors at night.  And yes, we keep the HR files locked.  And yes we use passwords on our computers.  But we need to be flexible.  If people want to take information home and work on it on their home computers, that’s a good thing.  We trust our employees.
9. Change is expensive.  When I need to get an invoice approved, I just put it in the right department’s mailbox at the front desk.  They usually pick it up in a few days and sign it.  We file it and then every few years pack up the old files and send them to off-site storage.  Why would we want to spend money to automate something this simple?
10. This information management stuff is just too squishy.  Managing our financial assets is important to us, so we invested in a top-notch financial system.  Managing our people is important, too, so we invested in HR systems.   But when you start talking about information, it’s just not as critical as our money and people.  And managing it seems so complicated.

What’s your document or content management excuse?

Related posts:

1. 8 things you need to know about making the case for document management in a recession
2. How much document management could you buy for $1.22 million
3. Simplicity

You can follow me on Twitter at jmancini77.

There's an interesting webinar coming up Wednesday the 4th at 2pm Eastern time that you might want to check out.  The topic? -- Tips and Tricks to Help You Automate your Office Documents

http://www.aiim.org/Events/Automation-ROI-Through-Improved-Recognition.aspx

One of the basic steps to automate the processing of your office documents is to scan them.  A key part of the capture process is recognition. Recognition accuracy—how well the analog document is converted to digital—is a key part of making your capture process as efficient as possible. The more accurate your capture process is, the fewer exceptions you will have to scan over, re-key, or just plain risk having incorrect data imported into your IT systems.  In countless surveys that we've done, the perceived ROI of a capture implementation rises as recognition technologies are applied.

Think of it this way.  You get some value by getting rid of paper and scanning documents and sticking them in an archive.  You get a LOT more by extracting and digitizing the information that resides on that paper and pushing it into a workflow.  All of which is particularly important in the current economic climate.

No charge for the webinar -- just sign up -- Tips and Tricks to Help You Automate your Office Documents.

Some past posts on capture that might be of interest...

1. 10 Commandments for an Effective DM Project
2. Harvey Spencer Conference -- Key Capture Trends
3. Cell Phone Capture

#1 of 8:  Revenues are down for 63% of companies.
#2 of 8:  Discretionary spending down significantly in 5 major areas (technology, training, travel, marketing, headcount), but technology spending proving the most resilient.
#3 of 8:  66% of companies see the current economic downturn lasting until at least 2010 (and 21% see it lasting for “several years”).
#4 of 8:  42% of companies now see somewhat non-traditional sources for acquiring document management capabilities (open source, SaaS, outsourcing) as their PREFERRED approach.
#5 of 8:  At 69% of companies, only those projects that can demonstrate positive hard dollar returns THIS YEAR are being approved.
#6 of 8:  For 69% of companies, capital requests are much more difficult to get approved than last year.
#7 of 8:  Information management effectiveness is viewed as critical by 89% of organizations.
#8 of 8:  Most organizations (86%) do not know what they do not know when it comes to information integrity; they are unconsciously incompetent when it comes to the effectiveness of their information management systems.

Findings based on survey conducted February 5 of 400 executives who “order, recommend, approve, or initiate computer hardware or software decisions.” 

For a copy of the full survey results, go HERE.  Download is free with registration.

You might also find interesting…

#1 of 8:  Revenues are down for 63% of companies.
#2 of 8:  Discretionary spending down significantly in 5 major areas (technology, training, travel, marketing, headcount), but technology spending proving the most resilient.
#3 of 8:  66% of companies see the current economic downturn lasting until at least 2010 (and 21% see it lasting for “several years”).
#4 of 8:  42% of companies now see somewhat non-traditional sources for acquiring document management capabilities (open source, SaaS, outsourcing) as their PREFERRED approach.
#5 of 8:  At 69% of companies, only those projects that can demonstrate positive hard dollar returns THIS YEAR are being approved.
#6 of 8:  For 69% of companies, capital requests are much more difficult to get approved than last year.
#7 of 8:  Information management effectiveness is viewed as critical by 89% of organizations.

Findings based on survey conducted February 5 of 400 executives who “order, recommend, approve, or initiate computer hardware or software decisions.” 

For a copy of the full survey results, go HERE.  Download is free with registration.

You might also find interesting…

#1 of 8:  Revenues are down for 63% of companies.
#2 of 8:  Discretionary spending down significantly in 5 major areas (technology, training, travel, marketing, headcount), but technology spending proving the most resilient.
#3 of 8:  66% of companies see the current economic downturn lasting until at least 2010 (and 21% see it lasting for “several years”).
#4 of 8:  42% of companies now see somewhat non-traditional sources for acquiring document management capabilities (open source, SaaS, outsourcing) as their PREFERRED approach.
#5 of 8:  At 69% of companies, only those projects that can demonstrate positive hard dollar returns THIS YEAR are being approved.
#6 of 8:  For 69% of companies, capital requests are much more difficult to get approved than last year.

Findings based on survey conducted February 5 of 400 executives who “order, recommend, approve, or initiate computer hardware or software decisions.” 

For a copy of the full survey results, go HERE.  Download is free with registration.

You might also find interesting…

#1 of 8:  Revenues are down for 63% of companies.
#2 of 8:  Discretionary spending down significantly in 5 major areas (technology, training, travel, marketing, headcount), but technology spending proving the most resilient.
#3 of 8:  66% of companies see the current economic downturn lasting until at least 2010 (and 21% see it lasting for “several years”).
#4 of 8:  42% of companies now see somewhat non-traditional sources for acquiring document management capabilities (open source, SaaS, outsourcing) as their PREFERRED approach.
#5 of 8:  At 69% of companies, only those projects that can demonstrate positive hard dollar returns THIS YEAR are being approved.

Findings based on survey conducted February 5 of 400 executives who “order, recommend, approve, or initiate computer hardware or software decisions.” 

For a copy of the full survey results, go HERE.  Download is free with registration.

You might also find interesting…

Download healthcareit.pdf (62.7K)

I don't know if any of you have had a chance to look at the electronic health records (EHR) portion of the stimulus bill (see above link), but for solution providers out there I'd take a look and start sharpening your healthcare practices because there's gold in them thar hills.

Putting aside the question of whether hospitals are a business needing a stimulus (judging from the bills the last time a family member was there, seems hard to believe), the money that hospitals will receive sure will change the economics of EHR implementations.

Now I'm not a lawyer (I just play one on TV), but there seem to be two components to the payments: 1) a base payment of $2 million; and 2) a floating payment of up to $4.6 million based on the number of annual patient discharges, which I would imagine is somehow designed to reflect hospital size.  And that's only for year one.  In years 2, 3, and 4 the payments will be 75%, 50%, and 25% of this amount.  So taking a hospital maybe in the middle that might get the $2M base and a $2M floating discharge-based payment in year one, it would appear that the "incentive" for implementing EHR would be a total of $10 million over 4 years.  Hey, that can buy one heck of an ECM system.

Turning to individual practices, the amounts for each provider (doctor, dentist, nurse practitioner) start at $15K per provider during year one, dropping to $12K, $8K, $4K and $2K for each of the next 4 years.  So let's take a practice with 4 doctors and a nurse practitioner.  That would mean total incentive payments of $205K to a 5-professional medical practice over 5 years.  Not bad!  That's a lot of scanners and software.  sure does change the economics of those files with the pretty colors on the top.

So my two questions to the world out there ...

1. Do I have this right?  and
2. If I do and you're a solution provider, what's keeping you from beefing up your medical records practice RIGHT NOW?

Download healthcareit.pdf (62.7K)

#1 of 8:  Revenues are down for 63% of companies.
#2 of 8:  Discretionary spending down significantly in 5 major areas (technology, training, travel, marketing, headcount), but technology spending proving the most resilient.
#3 of 8:  66% of companies see the current economic downturn lasting until at least 2010 (and 21% see it lasting for “several years”).
#4 of 8:  42% of companies now see somewhat non-traditional sources for acquiring document management capabilities (open source, SaaS, outsourcing) as their PREFERRED approach.

Findings based on survey conducted February 5 of 400 executives who “order, recommend, approve, or initiate computer hardware or software decisions.” 

For a copy of the full survey results, go HERE.  Download is free with registration.

You might also find interesting…

#1 of 8:  Revenues are down for 63% of companies.
#2 of 8:  Discretionary spending down significantly in 5 major areas (technology, training, travel, marketing, headcount), but technology spending proving the most resilient.
#3 of 8:  66% of companies see the current economic downturn lasting until at least 2010 (and 21% see it lasting for “several years”).

Findings based on survey conducted February 5 of 400 executives who “order, recommend, approve, or initiate computer hardware or software decisions.” 

For a copy of the full survey results, go HERE.  Download is free with registration.

You might also find interesting…

Industry Watch: State of the ECM Industry 2009

Now in its 6th year, this keystone AIIM survey has tracked many important parameters, particularly highlighting an alarming lack of confidence in the accuracy and accessibility of electronic records in general, and emails in particular. For this survey we are also measuring ROI factors and exploring levels of ECM integration.

Please help us to promote the benefits of ECM by taking part at this link:  http://www.aiimhost.com/survey. AIIM will make a charity donation for your participation.