Records Management: What's That?

Document imaging is not an end in and of itself. Rather, it's a means to an end. One of the most popular ends, and an emerging industry, is records management.

Records management capitalizes on the prodigious amounts of information that organizations struggle to manage and are often required to keep "on file." Over the course of years, these files, when kept in paper form, can quite literally drown an organization in dead trees.

Things can't be found or get lost, one person has a file that another person needs, and it's generally a pain to find anything. According to one study, 80 percent of employees spend 30 minutes or more per day searching for files.

Companies experiencing this dreadful dynamic are prime candidates for a records management makeover. At the risk of mastering the obvious, employees are more productive when they can find things.

But records management cannot begin, nor proceed, without effective document imaging. Document imaging brings those paper files into the digital world.

Once there, the mission of records management can be undertaken.