Going Paperless at the Office

Well, sort of paperless.

A few years ago we saw that we would soon be running out of space to store paper records.

What we had was a storage room full of archive boxes and bulging file cabinets.  This wouldn't have been too bad except there was no uniform document management system.  Most of the files in the cabinets used an old record ID system that had been retired in 1995; the rest of the material had just been randomly dumped wherever anyone found an empty drawer.  All in all, every former employee's document system was memorialized in our records. (This is being dealt with ... slowly.)

In the mean time, we were generating a ton of new paper records; and there was (is?) no hope of a enterprise-wide document management system (DMS) appearing any time soon.

Luckily we had the ability to create PDF files.  The decision was to go with three basic identifiers: client ID, document date, and subject/summary.  These could all be easily incorporated into the file name.

We haven't achieved 100% buy-in, as some people are still not comfortable without paper;  but we have severely cut down on printing costs and the record storage issues are at least manageable.

We did have to ask IT for more disk space (to be expected); which we were granted - along with a side-note which showed that IT was not in tune with the rest of the organization.

It will be interesting to see what happens when an enterprise DMS gets introduced; but that's not for another day, month, year, decade...