What's filling up our cabinets lately?

Early this morning, we were thinking about how we can grab more storage space for our amazingly eager team. The new guy heading our R&D section, David, thought we'd start with a cabinet I used to own. We opened it up and found a variety of documents of all forms that seemed infinite. It was ridiculously plentiful considering they were mostly brochures from trade shows and proposals of different lengths: one to two-pagers, ten-pagers, fifty-pagers and others that seemed to stretch endlessly in telling you about the history of their company and, regrettably, the rest of the universe.

The reality lately is that we're keeping so much stuff in our office drawers, filing cabinets, storage bins, document warehouses, etc. For the purposes of being absolutely clear, this includes tukadors and aparadors, perhaps the epitome of it all. And therefore, the first question is probably the most obvious. Followed by a lot more that nags even the most efficient companies.

How dare you (I'm asking myself here) keep so much unnecessary information? Aren't you, as an IT professional, supposed to be past the paper age? When is IT going to share what they know in dealing with all that archive? Is it paperless or paper-less? Why did you (asking myself again) bring home so much brochures from the expo? And at which century will you actually review them?

What's eating up enterprises lately is the sheer amount of paper that's being kept in--I would argue--expensive real estate, even if a huge chunk of it is clearly categorized as next to rubbish. Recordkeepers would argue there are things that need to be kept. The usual 201 file, historical papyrus and things necessary for internal revenue and documents for litigation, aptly identified as those under legal hold. Okay fine, let's keep that. But what about the rest? Things like resumes, proposal letters, company profiles, product brochures, contract drafts, and billions of duplicates of the same thing? There's an enterprise solution that fixes this problem. It's called a DMS, or a Document Management System.

Insurance companies were identified in a reading material I read a couple of years back (couldn't remember what it was). It says that no other industry can match the consumption these guys have, best described as "an historic devourer of trees." Insurance policies can go real fat depending on the coverage of an insured object, i.e. a house insured against every single event that can possibly happen. No less a Murphy's Law extravaganza. Coverage against lighting strike? Check!--here's an unlimited amount of paragraphs to sufficiently define what a lighting phenomena is to begin with. Against meatball fallout? Check!--here's them confirming they'll cover every kind of sauce flooding except the one with pesto on it. It messes up the wallpaper pretty badly. I reckon, more than your regular sauces!

Technology plays the most significant role in enacting change. With the right DMS solution, organizations can reduce complexity and have more time in things that matter. Not sure where to start? I'd recommend Google Apps as your backbone before anything. Let's talk about that again sometime. Cheers!