Precious papers preserved
When it comes to business continuity and disaster recovery, much emphasis is placed on getting electronic systems up and running as quickly as possible. This is a wise move for sure, but what if your business is one of many around New Zealand that can’t rely solely on electronic data storage?
Law firms, accountancy firms and local governments – these are all examples of organisations for whom archival and storage of original, hard copy documentation is often more than just a business requirement; they can also be legal requirements. Think of all the thousands of paper documents out there hat would simply vanish in the case of a fire or a flood. Fireproof rooms are one thing, but often the sprinkler systems do as much damage as flames.
Wills, for example, if presented in court in a damaged or altered form may not be admissible – a problem that could potentially cause endless headaches, not only for your business, but for your clients.
In situations such as these, the courts will accept digitally scanned copies, but only if the colour and tone of the original document are retained and they’re accompanied by an appropriate affidavit. So, from the start, any scanning system a company invests in needs to be up to the task of accurately duplicating a document. Further to this, once the original document has been scanned, it must then be stored away in a secure place where it will remain as safe as possible. Of course, once a document has been archived, chances are it’ll also be rather inconvenient to access, especially if the archive is located offsite.
In order to maintain some semblance of sanity in the office, quick and easy access to these documents needs to remain a priority. This means the scanning solution should also incorporate an electronic document management system. These days such systems are not only readily available, they’re more advanced than you might imagine.
A modern document management solution will be able to save the digital copies in a form that makes locating them as simple as typing a few words into a computer. To take matters onestep further, look for a solution that includes an optical character recognition (OCR) component. With OCR an organisation can search through scanned documents by keyword.
All this advanced functionality used to be the sole domain of specialised third-party operations, but now such systems can be installed in-house and operated easily by your staff. It may take some time to work through your entire catalogue of archived documents (short-term contractors are a good option for this chore), but once this task is completed, it’s simple to continue adding new documents to the database.
Business continuity and the ability to recover from disaster need no longer be a task for the too hard basket. Advances in technology now mean that effective document management systems are within reach of most businesses and organisations — so there’s no excuse for having to report back to a client with the worst possible news when disaster strikes.
