Everyone wants to take their office into the digital age, but the backlog of legacy paper records is often the biggest problem holding organizations back.  How do you go live with a digital records program on the first of April when your users were working with paper contracts on March 31st?  Often, what happens is an underground set of paper files begins to be used in your organization.  If there is no coherent method for dealing with the paper records in use before the "go live" date, how else could a diligent employee deal with it?

 We have some suggestions.  

1.  Move ALL paper records out of the offices the weekend before the go live date.  This will prevent people from doing double work by essentially continuing to maintain their paper records and the new digital records in your EDM.  

2.  Move all file cabinets out.  (See 1.)  Otherwise people will continue to file documents, even if they have been imaged.  Old habits die hard.

3.  Remove the ability to print from all but necessary users.  If you don’t do this step, you’ll find digitally native records are being printed from the EDM and filed.  Again, old habits die hard.

4.  Integrate search of paper backlog files with the new EDM.  Users hate looking in more than one place for something.

5.  Train, train, train

I know 1, 2 and 3 sound very harsh, but they are vital steps to ensure that your organization recuperates its investment in electronic document management.  Additionally, making adherence to the records management policy of your company should be part of every job description in the organization.  Failure to adopt and follow that records policy could then be followed with disciplinary measures.

The most difficult step is integrating search of paper backlog records with your new EDM.  Until all of the legacy paper documents have been destroyed, users will continually need to search in at least two places to find documents, the EDM and the paper files, whether they are in a cabinet, offsite, etc.  This makes it difficult to find the savings and productivity gains we all want.  The only way I’m aware of to do that efficiently is to use a product that allows you to search and view both paper legacy documents and digital documents in one repository. 

We offer this service at Data Storage.  It’s called Digital Fileroom. Data Storage moves all of your records out of your office and makes them digitally available on Digital Fileroom.  Users work with new ongoing work that is in workflow in Digital Fileroom and view old legacy documents in the same suite.   We are able to do this without scanning your entire backlog of records.  The service is very inexpensive as a result.  Call me to talk about it.   918-664-6164

Lastly of course is train everyone thoroughly.  If users are not comfortable with the EDM you choose, they just won’t use it.  I recommend a second training session for everyone between 2-3 weeks of your go-live date. 

Failure to do these things can mean a failure to launch your EDM program.