Electronic Archiving of Documents Still not Popular in Offices

Sixty-two percent of important paper documents are still being archived as paper, according to a survey conducted by 882 individual AIIM community members.

 

Survey shows that 25 percent of documents sent for archive scanning are being photocopied earlier just in case something happens. Very few original papers are methodically destroyed after scanning.

 

John Mancini, president of AIIM, said that companies have finally reached the point where archiving of documents electronically is effective, efficient and space consuming, but there are still, if not most, office staff that hang on to paper with a wrong notion that there is a legal reason to do it.

 

Even with the scanned paper documents’ legal admissibility being established for almost 20 years and is settled in the standards and legislation worldwide, users still have doubts that they might be required to produce the original paper copy at some point. The reality is that looking for and actually finding a paper copy is a lot more difficult than finding an electronic copy have evaded them.

 

About 70 percent of the survey partakers agreed with this reasoning. Scanned documents’ legal admissibility is still seen as a problem in 25 percent of businesses at organizational level.

 

Mancini said that there is a possible win-win situation in a lot of organizations but only 50 percent of the advantages of going electronic are being availed. The biggest user driver for investments in scanning and capture is the improved searchability of business documents. Reduced storage expenses, which is a more evident advantage is unrecognized because of the fixation of holding on to paper.

 

The AIIM Research Report is based on more than 850 responses and is titled “Document Scanning and Capture: local, central, outsource - what’s working best?” Using a Web-based tool, the survey was conducted between Oct 8 and Oct. 23.