Phil Greenwood, Commercial Director at the information storage contract company Iron Mountain, discusses how most business information is still spending much of its life on paper. That’s despite the fact that paper presents an ongoing challenge to businesses , he says.
Last December, just as everyone was preparing to head home for the festive break, a worrying story hit the scientific research press. A team at the University of British Columbia had been attempting to collect original research data from a random set of 516 studies published between 1991 and 2011. They discovered that 80 per cent of the scientific data that informed the studies had been lost. They noticed that for the first two years after publication, data was properly filed, protected and stored. Then it started to disappear, at a rate of 17 per cent a year. Never to be found again.
It is easy to convince ourselves that this couldn’t happen today in our connected, backed-up, data-driven universe; but the fact is that the majority of business information still spends much, if not all of its lifespan on paper. Every January, the information management sector stops to take stock of whether and how firms are reducing their dependence on paper. Every year it discovers that once again that progress is slow. The American Institute of Information Management’s (AIIM) 2013 study showed that just one in four organisations have a specific goal to drive paper out of the business.
Somehow we just can’t seem to wean ourselves off the hard copy. According to Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP), the average office employee still uses around 45 sheets of paper a day, with around half of the paper discarded almost immediately. The truth is that, left unmanaged, paper can pose a very real threat to your business. According to the firms Iron Mountain and PwC spoke to for our latest iteration of the Information Risk Maturity Benchmark study (1), employee management of paper records represents the single greatest threat to information safety. It topped the list for 66 per cent of UK firms, more than double the numbers concerned with external threats such as hacking and malware. We also found that the challenge presented by paper is becoming greater, not less, as firms move towards integrated and automated processes.
Two-thirds of firms in the UK (2) are struggling to integrate paper into their digital customer management processes and 63 per cent say someone has to enter the details manually into the automated system, a process vulnerable to error and inaccuracy. Four in ten (39 per cent) office workers admit that they don’t really know what to do with paper when it comes in and it just gets filed somewhere. Paper can be photocopied, shared and removed – not just once, but many times. It can be left lying around on desks and printers, filed randomly in unlocked drawers or cabinets and thrown in a public bin. It can be lost, damaged or destroyed in a way that is near-impossible to track.
We found that very few companies are addressing their concerns with concerted action. Just 31 per cent of the UK organisations we spoke to has introduced guidance for employees on how to store and dispose of paper documents and then monitored the effectiveness of these measures. In contrast, 39 per cent had done so for digital data. Taking paper out of the equation can remove many of the risks but it’s hard to achieve. If a paper free environment feels beyond reach, try starting with a paper-light approach. Decide what information is business-critical, sensitive, confidential, most frequently used or just new – and scan that into a digital format so it can be injected seamlessly into automated processes and systems. Ensure the journey of each digital document can be tracked end-to-end and that someone is accountable for its integrity. Then you can securely archive the rest of your paper off-site, where it can be indexed, managed and protected.
Alongside this you need to ensure your employees understand the risk and vulnerability of information; educate and support them and provide them with the tools they need to get it right. The enduring use of paper by employees is often the result of its convenience. It’s easy to scribble on, read on a train and useful to have to hand when the Wi-Fi connection to the office gets a bit shaky. If employees can access and use information just as easily in digital format, they will do so. This is the perfect opportunity to take the first step in this journey.
Notes
(1) The third Information Risk Maturity Index surveyed 1,200 mid-sized businesses (250-2,500 employees) and 600 enterprise businesses (over 2500 employees) in Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, Norway and the United States.
(2) Opinion Matters for Iron Mountain, February 2014. Opinion Matters surveyed 1257 Office workers who work in either, manufacturing and engineering, legal, financial, pharmaceutical or insurance from the UK, France, Germany, Netherlands and Spain. The research was carried out between January 10 and 22, 2014.
