Hugh, I'm going to respectfully disagree. A number of us have been
trying to pound sense into the IT storage management world lately when
some vendor gets up on his high horse and proclaims "Image it all!
Storage is so cheap that you can keep it forever!"

So let me do the math for you. Converting 10,000 boxes to "Texas toast"
is probably about $1,000,000 in expense. And that is a conservative,
low ball number of $100 per box. Depending upon what you're imaging,
that number could be ten times higher. 10,000 boxes is something like
20,000,000 sheets of paper. Let's say, for the sake of easy math, that
image capture is $.01 per side. That's $400,000. That number alone is
20 years of storage. But don't forget that every document (multiple
pages) has to be prepped and indexed. Records rarely index themselves
unless you own the entire document lifecycle. And there is a cost for
storage and backup -- and infrastructure for encryption and decryption.

I've said it before and I will say it again: It makes no sense to image
paper documents unless you are able to use imaging to improve your
business process. That means that you need to process the documents
remotely, in parallel, or that you need very fast access to the
documents for a period of time. You want to reduce cycle time or
improve customer service (internal or external). If the documents have
very high value (i.e. vital records) to your organization, it may make
sense to image them. But if you are imaging at the back end of the
lifecycle (i.e. after the work is complete), you're probably throwing
money away unless those documents have extremely high value and would
be detrimental to your business if they were lost.

I'm not in love with paper or commercial records centers. I'd just as
soon be rid of them both. But I cannot walk in to my management today
and justify imaging 300,000 cubic feet of mostly dead records that are
in storage. No one is going to write me a check for $30 million to get
that done. Most of those records will be shredded in the next five
years and are rarely referenced. They are being retained for legal
reasons or because the IRS isn't done with us yet.

So our job as records managers is to ensure that what we have in
storage is being managed and dispositioned as quickly as is legally
permissible. Our job is to further look for opportunities to manage
records in their electronic form where the record is "born digital".
And when a business process can be improved or vital records protected,
then we should be recommending that hard copy be imaged as part of the
business process.

And yes, if we need to store those pieces of "Texas toast", we need to
be very cautious because what was once dispersed among 10,000 scattered
boxes, is now very easily lost. When you digitize, you also can
increase the risk to your organization because so much more information
is in so much less space. Those 10,000 FAFSA forms lost in Louisiana
last year? If those were in paper, it is very unlikely that that many
could have been lost at one time, in the manner described. And the loss
of boxes of paper records generally exposes far less information at one
time -- and would require the criminal to extract the needed
information by hand, so the reward for the risk is quite a bit less for
the criminal. That doesn't mean that you should justify paper because
of the risk to digital, however.

And one more thing... in almost every one of those data breaches, what
was lost was electronic information -- not paper, so it is a red
herring to suggest that we stop storing paper because of the data
breaches. Yes, the breaches are a red flag and something that my
storage representative hears from me all too frequently. And yes, we
are holding them more accountable today than we did in the past for
issues with paper records.

But to suggest that we should image everything for the sake of
security, well I don't think that is a reasonable approach to business.
Nor is keeping everything in paper, for that matter.

And lastly, your final points about "Digits to dust" is very telling.
The people who walk around promoting imaging and content management
almost always forget to talk about data migration. Now, I will be quick
to note that the cited examples tend to be databases, not documents,
but document formats are also susceptible to migration issues over
time. When you build that system to store your records, you also need
to build in an allowance for data migration -- and that same cost
should be built in to your analysis for hard copy storage -- at some
point, you may need to migrate your records to another provider -- and
there will be a cost associated with that, so chasing the lowest per
cubic foot storage cost is crazy, if you're going to get hit with a
hostage fee down the road.

To sum up, if you have the opportunity to retain records in digital
form, do so. Improve your business process and increase the resiliency
of your organization. But take great care to protect that information
-- and provide a path to the future. If you have existing paper
records, make sure that they are all being managed and that you
disposition them as quickly as possible -- and hold your storage vendor
accountable for their security.

As I noted earlier in my previous post, companies do want to reduce
their real estate footprint. That is an opportunity to put better
business practices in place. It is also an opportunity to make the
right choices about what is stored in paper form and for how long.



Patrick Cunningham, CRM
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"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

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