“But I’m scanning to PDF now…” 7 reasons why this isn’t enough
Whether in Fresno or Sacramento, everyday we seem to come across organizations who say exactly the above, “But I’m scanning to PDF already John-Paul…” They wonder what would be different with the solutions we recommend, and are curious how other clients are benefiting compared to the simple approach they’ve been taking.
This article will explore 7 unique reasons why scanning to PDF should not be your end goal. Don’t get us wrong, it’s a great place to start but there are quite a few limitations with this approach compared to using a dedicated document or content management solution (like Laserfiche or Fortis). We will share each item below with a focus towards HR to provide context.
#1. File Names Don’t Matter
With a simple PDF, you are limited by the name of the file in terms of providing context (what it actually is). However, with most document management systems, you have the ability to provide a template or set of metadata for a document. Here you can provide other context like “First Name”, “Last Name”, “SSN”, “Date Hired”, etc. if it’s a personnel file as an example.
We recommend populating whatever fields in this template would make sense from a retrieval standpoint. In other words, you don’t want to get super detailed but it’d be helpful to have some of the most common information indexed. At this point, the documents name becomes irrelevant as we can see at a glance the Last Name, First Name, SSN, Doc Type, etc.
With a PDF you are limited to a combination of characters and this cannot exceed 255 in Windows. While this might be a good approach for a single set of documents within a single department (say employee files within HR), when you branch out from here the system can collapse and you end up with a lack of standardization. New employees will come in and ask “Why did the person before me set this up this way, it makes no sense” or “How can I replicate this across XYZ documents now?”.
#2. Security
Security with a PDF is based on basic user security whereby John Doe has access to the following set of folders on the network and he can access all documents within those folders. Generally each document is treated the same as the others (in terms of what you can do with it once inside these folders) and if a document is incorrectly placed in the wrong location, it’s now possibly able to be accessed. You could encrypt PDFs and sometimes require a password, but this is an unnecessary step that will become a nuisance after a while (both for those accessing the documents and those having to secure them).
Document management solutions on the other hand provide a very granular approach to security. First and foremost, staff are required to login to the application with a username and password or they can just pass their Windows login credentials to the application if this is more convenient. This is the first step of security, and this alone dictates what type of access to documents the system will display. John Doe may be in HR and only be allowed to see the HR documents while his manager Jane Smith may be able to also see the Fiscal and Legal documents.
So not only can security be at the folder level, but once inside the respective folders, staff may have limited access rights or actions they can perform. Some may only have read only access, while others may be able to scan or edit documents. Perhaps you don’t want some staff to be able to see SSNs, so you could annotate or redact this sensitive information but still have a user with the ability to “See through redactions” while a lower level user might not have this ability. In this case, they will just see white or black redactions in those locations. You can even go so far as to give people the ability to view but not print information and really maintain control over your content and how it’s accessed.
#3. Network & Web Access
If we look at a PDF, generally the best way for us to share this with staff is through our network of Windows folders. Staff can navigate to a particular drive and then access the respective documents or records (for example, Jane will head to E:/Human Resources/Employee Files). While this is good in practice, it has limitations as there will be times when Jane may need to access something but it resides in a folder she hasn’t been given permission to access. Yes it could be that she’s not supposed to see that respective folder, but many times it’s simply that it hasn’t been done yet OR the documents reside in someone’s local folder. How is Jane able to access a related HR record if it’s on John’s desktop?
So with PDFs we really only have one way of sharing these documents amongst staff (Windows folders) and yes the occasional emailing of them which is more of a reactive approach as it involves too many steps. Compared to Jane going straight to the source and retrieving it herself, she has to contact John who then has to perform a search, and then create an email, attach the files, and send to Jane.
For people outside the organization, it’s even more cumbersome as the process of putting PDFs on your website is always a manual push. In other words, you may want to share board minutes or agendas or particular forms for people to download and access, but you always have to upload or point to a static file. If that file is ever revised, or a new document needs to be uploaded for consumption (say minutes), there’s no simple way to do this without updating that particular page of your website with a new link to that then uploaded PDF document. So for both the public and your own staff, PDFs have limitations on HOW you distribute them and more importantly the steps it takes to retrieve them.
With a dedicated document management solution though, you have a variety of ways to make that information available to both staff and those outside the organization. Number one is that you will be providing a centralized repository to all staff (and even the public if you wanted) where all your content will reside. These applications will serve as the foundation and provide a single source or location for staff to go to when they need to pull information up. Gone will be the information silos, the multiple applications each housing their own respective data (documents & records), and staff will then have a shared service they can all use simultaneously and to access their content.
If it becomes a policy that staff are not to store HR records or related documents locally on their computers, but rather in the document management solution than you will always have a single location to go to with the ability to still provide granular security as we mentioned earlier. So to confirm, Jane Doe could access the solution, login with her username and password, and possibly see just the HR records. John Doe on the other hand will login with his username and password, and also see the Engineering folder, the Accounting folder, etc. A big benefit here is that both didn’t have to ask themselves “What system did I save that record to?” or “Where did Jane/John store the X or Y records that were scanned?”
In addition to simple access through a desktop client, many solutions today offer both web accessibility and even mobile access. So leveraging the same back-end solution where all your content already resides, you can then also add on tools to web-enable the applications. Staff are then able to access documents and records wherever they are in the world really, so long as they have internet access. Most are browser-independent so whatever web browser staff are comfortable using will be just fine, but they are able to search and retrieve records, provide indexing, annotate documents, print, email, and even scan new documents in an ad-hoc fashion.
Mobile solutions allow them to be able to use their iOS devices (iPhone, iPad), as well as Android devices, and pull up any document. They can do almost anything they would in the web-based client on their smartphone, including the ability to use the devices camera as a capture tool while adjusting for the curvature of an image, possibly OCRing (optical character recognition) the document, and sending it directly to the centralized repository for others to access. So you could be out in the field, have a need to capture a specific page or form, capture it with your devices camera and it would then end up in your application for staff at your home office to access, all in real time.
You can see how there are far more benefits to having a dedicated document and/or records management solution compared to just scanning to PDF alone (relying on just storing the content in a network or local Windows folder). We will visit auditing and records management differences in the next post of this series.
#4. Auditing
Today, more than ever, it’s important to be able to not just secure your data but also provide insight on what’s occurring with it.
In the “paper world” documents can be left on someone’s desk, eventually read by someone else, removed, lost, damaged, etc. Many people think that their records are more secure here vs. in an electronic format but that’s not the case. We discussed Security earlier, and with a PDF it’s rather hard to track or audit the activity of your staff or colleagues.
Let’s say we have an HR folder on the network where we store all of our PDF files and items we scanned into the computer. So long as staff have access to this folder, they can access these documents, print them, make changes or delete them (given the right), as well as other activities. Say someone did delete a document in here, it’s hard to later go back and track that activity. It’s difficult to run a report showing who accessed the document, what they did with it, and what their final action with it was.
With a document management solution though, all true/false events can essentially be audited or tracked. For example, we could see not only that Jane Doe logged into the system at 2:57 p.m. on April 23, 2012, but also that once inside she attempted to access the John Smith file, and then tried to save it locally. Or she accessed the file, made changes to a particular field. Or she simply selected the file and deleted it. All of these activities can be tracked so that after the fact, there’s an “e-paper trail” a manager could follow. The organization now has insight into the activity surrounding their digital assets, and a report can even be generated highlighting all of this activity.
As a side note, many document management solutions have Recycle Bins (similar to Windows) where if an item is deleted, it’ll end up here. So while Jane Doe may delete a file in the example above, it won’t be permanently deleted and a manager may have access to the Recycle Bin to restore it or see what has been deleted by staff.
#5. Records Management
Another large reason why scanning to PDF today is not enough is records management (RM). Today records management is a phrase spoken and heard by many, and organizations of different sizes are becoming more and more aware of the need for a proper RM strategy to be in place.
Our rule of thumb is that you want to hang onto records long enough to where they are still seen as an asset, but not too long to where they are a liability.
For example, in California after an employee is let go, the employer is responsible to hang on to their respective application and related files for 7 years. Once this retention period is up and the document has met the end of its life cycle, it could technically be purged or destroyed.
In the physical realm, this is generally managed by boxes labeled by year and stored away in your warehouse or perhaps filing room. Unless an organization has a dedicated records manager, they simply follow a process of moving the records offsite for destruction at the beginning of the calendar year when those documents are now eligible for disposition. This is an ideal scenario, while many organizations keep records for much longer than they need to. Some take the approach of storing them forever or in perpetuity while this might not be required.
With PDFs, there really is no good way to handle this outside of doing something similar electronically. In other words, you could create a folder structure in Windows based on year or retention type, although staff won’t see this as helpful and it’ll be tough to access specific records. Those in HR don’t necessarily care about record types and retention, and would prefer to navigate to an employee’s folder and see all of their records in one location, more of an employee-centric view.
With a document/records management software solution, this is now much easier to manage. As records are brought into the solution, their retention schedules can automatically be assigned with staff spending very little time on this step. So the employee files may have a 7 year retention schedule assigned as an example. After that period of time, the solution won’t ever automatically purge or delete them as this would be a risk, and it wouldn’t be helpful. Instead, a records manager or staff member can run a report or search in this system and return all the records that ARE eligible for disposition. Say this report or search brings back 2,000 results, it’s very likely then that these results have reached the end of their life cycle and can be destroyed properly.
As a side note, the highest level of records management certification a software solution today can receive is DoD 5015.2. DoD 5015.2 is the de-facto software standard which provides implementation and procedural guidance on the management of records in the DoD. It establishes requirements for managing classified records, and includes requirements to support the Freedom of Information Act, Privacy Act, and interoperability.
So not only can we track or audit more activity with a document/records management solution compared to just scanning to PDF alone, but we also have more control over how our records are dealt with and can remain in compliance easier.
http://www.applebyco.com/blog/2012/06/26/but-im-scanning-to-pdf-now-7-reasons-why-this-isnt-enough/
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