It seems obvious that you should reduce your records management (RM) costs and risks by scanning your paper records into an imaging system, and then applying records management to those electronic images. There are well-defined cases where imaging for RM will succeed and well-defined cases where it will fail. This post will help you understand when you should do imaging for RM and when you shouldn’t.
Most imaging projects that scan for RM purposes fail to achieve ROI or significantly reduce records management risks. And the reason is not because they “fail to execute” in some narrow sense, but rather that it was the wrong project to take on. You can succeed at imaging for RM – but you have to be addressing the right kind of opportunity, and you have to implement a lot of pieces.
Most RM costs come from two sources:
- Paper record storage costs
- Paper record transaction costs (from moving files around, retrieving files, dealing with lost files, etc.)
If you are familiar with the volumes, costs, and other metrics associated with departmental imaging projects, your first impression might be that scanning for RM would have a good business case: the volumes are often a lot higher than the typical departmental opportunity, the paper storage costs are higher, and the transaction costs are higher – particularly if you outsource to Iron Mountain or similar firms.
But a lot of paper records are of no value and little risk and shouldn’t be retained, many are difficult to index, and most are never retrieved. Moreover, the imaging initiative requires an ECM or RM system to provide a repository – one that’s successfully implemented and ready for records. Once these complexities are factored in, whatever business case there was usually disappears. There’s too much cost and risk of failure.
There are many scenarios where you can succeed with imaging for RM, however. These are situations:
- Where paper RM costs are very high, where they retrieved a lot, where you already have ECM/RM system (addressing the above issues)
- Where these paper records are part of a well-defined business process, so there is minimal “garbage” to convert, and the documents are already well understood and managed
- Where legal discovery costs and risks are high for those documents
Here’s an example involving high legal discovery costs where you could be very successful if you did imaging for RM purposes.
Discovery costs are typically primarily driven by the number of custodians associated with each discovery event and the volume of documents associated with each custodian. If you have a geographically distributed, paper-laden organization, you will have lots of custodians with redundant paper files that have to be identified, “held”, collected, and processed. Think of paper customer or personnel files spread around corporate, departmental, and field offices. By doing capture and providing version control and universal access, you can cut down a lot of custodians, a lot of volume, and reduce your discovery cost and risk.