The Digital Revolution: Document Management

I thought I’d write today a short report on a silent revolution that is taking place in the way businesses are being managed at the ‘back end’.

If you’re a manager in a large company, you will probably be familiar with document management solutions. This describes the effective management of digital information. Such services can be outsourced or in-sourced (depending on organisation size) but regardless of the implementation, this area is fantastic at slashing admin costs and efficiency, particularly in finance departments.

“But naturally” you quip, “my ERP/Operating System may be a little buggy or annoying, but overall it manages our digital information perfectly fine, so why is this a ‘new’ and revolutionary idea?”

The answer lies in exactly what counts as digital information. 10 years ago, there was a clear divide between paperwork, and electronic information. However in today’s business environment, the line doesn’t even exist anymore. Digitisation companies can literally come in and scan your entire archive of invoices, orders and delivery notes onto your server. For your admin team, searching through filing cabinets becomes literally a thing of the past.

But such improvements don’t just save the fingertips of admin staff; they also improve the customer experience. Having near-instant access to customer forms and information will enable customer service reps to handle far more queries at the time of a call, rather than having to ‘get back to the customer’, which is inefficient and harms goodwill.

Such is the fast paced world of today, that many managers will digitalise their documents without giving much thought to the massive shift in the type of office work performed by administrative and technical staff as a result. With the acceleration of technological advancement at the speed it is, perhaps it is good that managers are not fazed by such a change!