File Act or Toss?

Training & Development, Feb, 2001 by Barbara Hemphill

We never use 80 percent of the information we keep.

Predictions of a paperless office began more than 10 years ago, yet statistics show that 90 percent of the world's information is still on paper. Can that change? Will it?

After spending more than 20 years in offices from one-person, home-based businesses to large corporations, I contend that a more important question is, Can you find the information you need when you need it, regardless of the form it takes?

I have yet to find a company that is able to manage its electronic information effectively without first learning how to manage its paper. The reason is usually that companies and people don't address these fundamental questions of information management:

* What information do we need to keep or create?

* In what form?

* By whom?

* For how long?

The ability of any individual or organization to accomplish any given task or reach any desired goal is directly related to the ability to find the right information at the right time. Unfortunately, studies show that the average worker spends about 150 hours per year looking for misplaced information.

What should you keep or create? Research shows that 80 percent of the information we keep, we never use. Our fear of throwing out paper is enormous. I've heard participants in my seminars say, "Every time I throw something away, I need it again!" When I challenge them to elaborate, they often respond, "I can't think of an example right now."

Whether it's the fear of not being knowledgeable in one's field of expertise or being asked by one's manager to produce information, the results are the same: overstuffed filing cabinets and full-to-capacity hard drives. For 15 years, I've orchestrated File Clean-Out Days for companies. I used to have nightmares that after one such event, someone would call with a horror story about something he or she threw away and later needed. It's never happened.

Many companies hold their own file clean-out days, yet fail miserably because management didn't create any criteria, approaches, or tools to enable and empower employees to make decisions. Clutter is, in essence, postponed decisions.

So, how do you decide what to keep? Begin with your company's mission and goals. What business are you in? What information do you need to reach those goals? And, of course, what information is required by regulators?

Another important and often-overlooked question is, What information can you create that would add value to your company? Filing cabinets and computer drives are packed with information that, when readily available, can save time, improve products and services, and generate new revenue streams.

For example, whenever an employee learns a new technique, such as how to create a new report from a software program, a how-to guide can be written and made accessible to all employees on the company's intranet or network. Or consider this: What resource information is in your files that could be packaged and sold to potential customers or given as added value to existing customers? In what form? Paper or electronic? Only a small part of the information currently on paper is worth converting to a computer-readable format. However, as the quantity of information received and generated increases, electronic storage options become more attractive.

There are basically two approaches to saving information electronically. One involves scanning paper documents and storing them as images. You can view them using a file-viewing tool such as Adobe's Acrobat Reader. The other approach is to scan documents and convert their contents to computer-readable format (text) using OCR (optical character recognizing) software. Then there's the issue of how to store the files. Optical recording technologies such as CD-ROMs are relatively inexpensive; magnetic storage using hard drives allows for faster retrieval.

You have numerous other issues to decide, such as color versus black and white, how many documents to handle on a daily basis, and whether to make a printout.

The obvious advantage to electronic storage is saving space. Speed is also a major benefit and can be particularly attractive when electronic customer information records are interfaced with a telephone system that identifies callers. Even if you have to type a customer's name before retrieving the file, the improvement in customer service can be remarkable. Expense reports, invoices, credit reports, and other documents related to customer accounts are good candidates for electronic storage.

The downside is that if the system is too difficult to learn or too slow, employees will retreat quickly to paper. The biggest threat may be people who believe they're storing vast quantities of critical information on CDs and other digital storage media but haven't considered that the lifetime of such media isn't guaranteed. Remember all of those 5-and- 1/4-inch floppy disks for which we now have no hardware?

Obsolescence is a big challenge, but the biggest hurdle for most companies is the cost of equipment and training, and time for implementation. In my experience, the answer is a carefully managed approach using the best attributes of electronic and paper storage. The more effectively a company learns to manage paper, the easier and more cost-effective it will be to move to electronic storage.