Archive Digitization – One Step Closer to EIM, Enterprise Information Management
The amount of data and information is constantly increasing. It’s estimated that in organizations, the amount of information is doubled every two years. In the past, when information arrived in organizations on paper, known as analog data, it now comes through a variety of channels and in many different formats.
Managing multi-channel and multi-quality information is a challenge that’s becoming more and more significant every year. How can you access all the information, even the most valuable and critical to the organization if you don’t know what information is available and where it can be found?
Analogical and digital dark data
Dark information can be divided into two types: analogical and digital. Analogical dark data means paper archives and information lying in them. The information in these archives is often important to organizations, but managing it requires resources and creates vulnerabilities concerning data security.
Digital dark data is information stored in organizations' data warehouses. Data warehouse refers to all programs that an organization has implemented to manage data better: Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint, and other cloud services. However, how many people consider all of these overlapping programs as facilitators of finding information conveniently and effectively?
In traditional data storage systems that use a folder structure, it basically doesn’t matter what you are searching for. What counts, is where the document is. Without knowing this information, you won’t be able to find it. And if you find it, how can you be sure it’s the latest version of the document?
Everyone has different classification principles. One person might think a certain document goes in the “Customer” -folder, another thinks it belongs in the “Offers” -folder, the third classifies it by date. Familiar? And if the right document is not found, a copy is often made hence the data chaos is complete. After that, there’s a mass of digital dark data that cannot be controlled.
Benefits of digitization
However, analogical dark data can be easily brought to digital form by digitizing. Hiring a summer worker to scan paper archives is a waste of time and money, and it only does a great disservice to the organization. Namely, when digitizing paper documents, it’s important to consider the quality of the results and the indices.
The quality of the digitized paper is improved, and indices are extracted, when done by professional. Without indices, the digitization of paper archives merely converts analogue dark data into digital dark data. By scanning the documents on your own it only provides additional padding for the network drives, and the time-consuming search for information continues.
The indices are the desired information extracted from the digitized documents, which together with the EIM (Enterprise Information Management) -system make the information easily discoverable. It simply turns the data management system into organization’s own, secure, internal Google. Without indices, digitizing is utterly a waste of time, money and resources.
Combine digital information using metadata
By converting analog data to digital form by digitizing it and extracting the desired indices, an easily manageable digital archive is created.
When all information is in digital form, it is possible to organize, retrieve, and manage it in a secure manner. Using a meta word, the data management system immediately imports all the information related to the word, whether it is located on any network drive, in SharePoint, or in another cloud service. Only the latest versions of agreements, offers and other documents are available to find.
Analog and digital dark data has now become a single, manageable entity, where information can be found quickly and easily. With this package and a functional EIM -system, you save working hours, increase cost efficiency and build a competitive advantage.
For more information on Digital Office Company’s solutions in EIM, visit our website.
Digital Office Company works with information management with great passion and heart. We want to spread the same passion and fire to you as well, so you can make the most out of your time.
