• Reviewing a received document for making any suggestions
• Approving a document for authorizing the relevant action, such as submitting a proposal to a client
• Getting signatures of persons who must sign a document before it becomes an authorized document
• Tracking progress of projects or problem solutions
• Doing any other action with a particular document, as when it needs to be translated into local language
• Approving final disposal of a document after its expiry date

Workflows in the Paper Documents Era

Paper documents are moved physically from person to person, with a person typically designated to attend to this task where the volume is large enough. Such physical movement poses several risks such as:

• Misplacing the documents resulting in the documents becoming untraceable
• Losing a document during transmission in the absence of foolproof transmittal processes
• Documents reaching unauthorized persons as when it is stolen by an interested person
• Delays in completing business processes as when a document has to be retrieved from storage

These problems made managers welcome digital workflows when technology made it a possible alternative.

Digital Workflows

Digital workflows involve creating documents in a digital format and converting paper documents into that format. Digital documents become part of an electronic workflow that has several advantages such as:

• Physical movements are eliminated as the documents typically reside in a central server of a network that can be accessed by all workstations connected to the network. This can minimize the possibility of loss and damage
• The progress of a document can be tracked from one’s own workstation as when a sender checks whether the recipient has taken needed action on the document. This can often be done simply by retrieving the document and checking it
• Recipients of documents can be alerted about pending documents by the computer program itself, through emails when the documents arrive and through system generated alerts when a document has been pending beyond a certain period
• In a busy work environment, a person might not be aware of whom to send the document or what to do next. Electronic workflows can attach rules to document categories that enables the person look up what to do next
• Routing documents becomes a flexible and convenient task. You can select a recipient and then send the document to that recipient along with any necessary instructions. This can prove a significant benefit where a document needs to be routed in a different way than usual.
• Simultaneous access to the same document is also possible as the documents in the central server can be retrieved by more than one person at the same time (though modifications might be restricted to only one of these concurrent users).

The above is only some of the major advantages. In practice, electronic workflows can improve business processes dramatically. Many of the tasks can even be automated, for example.

More importantly, however, a paperless office could speed up business processes. Business processes typically involve considerable movement of documents. While paper documents move at irritatingly slow speeds, electronic documents in a paperless office move at electronic speeds, i.e. near the speed of light.

In practice, the documents are stored in a central server that can be accessed from workstations connected to the network. Programs can trigger alerts drawing the attention of concerned persons to pending documents. With quick access to documents and the use of such alerts, business processes can move far more speedily compared to a paper environment.

The Mirage of a Paperless Office

Paper is not going to disappear from offices, however. There are several reasons for this.

• Some office workers might not be computer-literate or comfortable with computers even if they know how to use computers.
• For certain kinds of work that require a relaxed and/or thoughtful style of work, printed documents might be preferred to flickering computer screens. Examples include design prototyping of come kinds, serious study of a topic (that might involve adding comments in the margins) and such. It is not easy to match the visual interface provided by paper in such cases.
• Extremely confidential documents can leak out if they are stored on computer.
• Courts of law might not accept digital documents as evidence unless they are convinced that systems and practices are in place that prevent faking these documents, a comparatively easy process in a digital environment.

For these and other reasons, paper will continue to be used in offices. The completely paperless office is likely to remain a mirage.

Moving towards a Paperless Office

Though a completely paperless office might be mirage, it is possible to reduce the use of paper documents through certain practices. These include:

• Online capture of data where possible. POS terminals used in retail establishments are an example. So are handheld devices used in inhospitable environments such as offshore drilling platforms to record data that can be transmitted wirelessly to the office computers.
• Automated capture of data through the use of sensors that can count, read and measure. Barcode readers in warehouses, electronic counters monitoring production lines and temperature sensors in process plants are examples.
• Scanning paper documents at the point the paper documents arrive and using OCR and indexing software to transfer these into the electronic workflow.
• Implementing systems and practices to authenticate digital documents in a manner that would be acceptable to courts of law.

In an environment like the above, the generation of paper documents can be minimized and most of the remaining paper documents can be shredded after transfer into digital format.

• A scanned image that is more legible than the original document in a poor condition or with poor contrast (say, blue ink on a dark colored paper)
• Scanned images to be used for subsequent printing, or for Web pages or in emails
• Scanned images that reveal greater detail than what the human eye could see on the original

Let us look at the kind of adjustments that can produce desired results.

Adjustments to Improve Document Quality

Adjusting brightness and contrast can often produce results that are better than the original. Adjustments are also possible for color, exposure etc that too can produce better results.

You can also work with the original document to get better scanned images. For example, you can iron out the folds in a much folded document so that it lies really flat on the scanner bed. This can avoid distorted characters.

Other precautions include scanning with the correct orientation appropriate for the document. Scanning a landscape oriented document with a portrait orientation and then rotating the image for correcting the orientation can lose some detail.

Details can also be preserved better if you scan only those portions of the original document that you need for your purpose.

Selecting the Output Type

You can set the scanning software to produce scanned images in different formats. A TIFF format reproduces details and is suitable if you want to print the scanned image. The price for this kind of detail is larger file size.

If you are planning to upload the scanned image to a Web page or use it in an email, you can do with much less detail. A compressed file format such as JPEG is adequate in these cases.

Selecting the Resolution

Resolution is measured in dots per inch (DPI). The more the number of dots, the greater the detail you get. The following is a rough guide to help you select the right resolution.

• Select a 1200×1200 dpi (or 1.44 million dots per square inch) resolution if your intention is to use the image in emails and or Web pages. Some loss of detail is okay in these cases.
• A 1600×3200 dpi (or 5.12 million dots per square inch) resolution shows the image in the same way that the human eye sees the original.
• If you want to enlarge and study fine detail, select a 2400×4800 dpi (or 11.52 million dots per square inch) resolution.

Web Pages and Emails

Actually, it is ppi – pixels per inch – that matters when you work with Web pages. Divide the screen width in pixels by the picture’s length in inches to get the ppi. Then save the picture with that ppi.

For emails, very small size files are important, and it is best to save any pictures at 72 or 100 dpi.

We would be able appreciate this fact better if we look at the typical steps that take us towards this minimal paper office. The following are major steps you take to minimize paper in your office:

• You capture data directly into the electronic system instead of on paper. The following are examples of such direct data capture:
• The POS (Point of Sale) terminals you see at retail establishments capture sales transactions details and transmit them direct to the central database.
• Handheld devices similar to mobile phones can accept data entry in the field, such as offshore drilling platforms that are inhospitable for computer installations. The data thus captured can be transmitted to the central systems.
• Barcode readers in warehouses can sense movement of merchandise into and out of warehouses.
• Electronic counters installed along conveyor belts can count items passing along the conveyors.
• Electronic sensors can measure temperatures, voltages and such variables and record/transmit the measurements.

Where Do Software Come into the Picture?

All the equipment mentioned above, viz. POS terminals, handheld devices, barcode readers, electronic counters and sensors, and the scanner, cannot work without appropriate software. In fact, you have to look at the software and ensure that they have the features that you need. All software is not the same.

The software element is more obvious in the following cases that too are necessary to help you move to the paperless office:

• OCR software that makes the text character images on scanned documents into computer readable formats such as ASCII. This usually comes with the scanners.
• Search engine software that indexes all the documents and make them searchable in different ways.
• SCM and CRM systems that automates several interactions and transactions with suppliers and customers, eliminating much paper in the process.
• Content Management Systems (CMS) that integrates all the different kinds of documents into a common database that is easy to work with. Such CMS can accept documents being generated at numerous geographically spread out locations of an enterprise, and make the information available throughout the organization. All the paper documents are scanned into the CMS by scanning workstations equipped with heavy duty scanners, and OCR and indexing software.

There is one more step before you can confidently move towards a paperless environment. This step is needed to ensure that your electronic documents will be accepted by courts of law as evidence in case it becomes necessary.

It is comparatively easy to tamper with electronic documents and hence courts might not accept them as conclusive evidence. To overcome this problem, you have to install software systems and operating practices that would authenticate the digital documents in the system.

Thus an audit trail can be generated that logs every single event that has happened to a document. You will know who accessed it and when and what the person did with it. In such an environment, you can prove that a particular document has not been tampered with in any way.

Mortgage Document Management

Mortgage is a document-intensive business. Each mortgage involves a great deal of preliminary paperwork and additional paperwork is required for completing it. Once a mortgage process is over, years of paperwork follows until the mortgage is fully repaid. Without an excellent document management system, a mortgage business could find itself in deep trouble.

Let us look at the kinds of documents generated at different stages, and finally see how computers can transform the mortgage document management process.

Mortgage Preliminaries

Before a mortgage loan is given, the lenders have to satisfy themselves about both the borrower’s creditworthiness and the property’s value. The last mentioned item, property value, is also affected by prior charges on the property and the lender has to check the liabilities under any prior charges

In addition to the above, a lot of preliminaries for creating a valid mortgage is also attended to at this stage.

A great deal of documents are generated during the above processes and considering that a mortgage company would be handling several loan requests at a time, it is important to keep track of all the documents without creating an unmanageable chaos.

An idea of the variety and volume of documents generated at this stage can be gleaned from the following list of standard pre-mortgage documentation.

• Appraisal
• Credit Report
• Escrow Deposit for Taxes and Insurance
• Title Company Closing Fee Payment
• Borrower’s Attorney Fee Payment
• Lender’s Attorney Fee Payment
• Home Inspection
• Title Insurance
• Flood Determination/Life of Loan Coverage
• Homeowner’s Insurance
• Underwriting
• Survey
• Down Payment
• Loan Discount Points
• Drafting the Mortgage Deed and Incidentals
• Payment of Transfer Taxes
• Recording at County Records
• Couriering Documents
• Prepayment of Interest

Mortgage Loan Documents

Creating a valid mortgage involves additional documentation as indicated below:

• Settlement statement listing all costs and fees
• Truth in lending statement disclosing annual percentage rate
• Mortgage Note detailing the terms and conditions of the loan
• Mortgage Deed of Trust identifying the property offered as security. The deed would affirm that a charge has been created and include other essential clauses.
• Monthly payment letter listing the amounts and due dates for all payments – principal repayments and interest payments.

At this stage, there is also the problem of selecting just the right kind of mortgage deed. There are several types of mortgages with each of them having their own legalese. To avoid creating these varied kinds of documents from scratch, companies typically use standard templates tailored to each kind of mortgage.

Post Mortgage Documentation

Repayments under a mortgage loan can extend to several decades, with payments being made every month. Each payment gives rise to documentation such as payment requests, payment acknowledgments, accounting, overdue reminders and even legal documentation if payment default persists.

Using Computers for Document Management

With computers, mortgage document management can be transformed into a highly reliable system. In addition to standard templates that can be filled in easily, computer based DMS can keep track of pending documentation and pending payments, and generate timely alerts. Each account would be tracked individually so that there is no confusion that can easily occur under a paper based system.

Classes of Documents

We can see three main categories of documents in a legal office:

• Litigation Documents: Documents that is unique to a particular litigation, such as evidentiary documents, depositions, arguments, judgments and so on.
• Litigation Support Documents: These constitute the documents such as the law library that is available for supporting all litigation work.
• Administrative Documents: Work assignment sheets, payroll, invoices, supplier bills, accounts, general correspondence and so on.

It is better to manage each of these categories of documents separately.

Litigation Documents

If a particular law suit involves a great deal of documents, you can store them on a laptop and carry them around with you. You can then easily refer to these while holding discussions with your clients, or presenting your arguments before the court. You can store the documents in a folder that identifies which case the documents refer to.

If a case involves very few documents, it might not be worthwhile to transfer these to the computer, however. Periodically, you should also move the folders of finished cases to an archive at your office computer. That way, the clutter on your laptop can be cleared, and space released to store new cases.

Litigation Support Documents

You can store whole law libraries on your computer. Readymade packages containing such libraries are available in the market. You can also purchase updates so that your library is always current.

When such a library is available, you can look up relevant decisions and case law much more effectively, using the search facility that comes with these packages. If the library is stored on your laptop, you can refer to it wherever you carry the laptop. Even if the library is on the office computer, you can access it from anywhere with an Internet connection.

Administrative Documents

Administrative documents will consist of transaction documents such as time sheets and current payroll, general documents such as correspondence with your landlord and archives of non-current documents that might be needed for future reference.

Managing these documents follow the standard document management practices. Packages such as payroll, billing and accounting are used to speed up transactions and ensure that errors and omissions are minimized. Correspondence and other general documents are stored under meaningfully labeled computer folders. Archives are optimized for querying.

Billing systems are of particular value to lawyers. Time worked on cases can be recorded in an automated fashion as you work on each case. You can also record times you spent offline on a case.

Billing can occur weeks after the work and by marking off billed times, you can keep track of times yet to be billed. A billing system can even alert you about these.

Legal document management can thus help you in several areas of your practice.

The digital data stored in computers can get damaged or lost owing to:

• Disk drive malfunction as when the read/write head touches the platter (instead of floating a microscopic distance away)
• System crashes or electrical disturbances causing the data to get corrupted and unreadable
• Accidental deletion of data by operators or administrators, or formatting of media that contains needed data
• Malicious damage to data caused by persons with a grievance against the company
• Virus and hacker attacks leading to loss of or damage to data
• Misplaced or stolen storage media containing valuable data
• Physical disasters like fire, flood and earthquake

As you will begin to realize, data damage and loss can occur in all offices.

Impact of Data Loss

Modern business organizations work with documents and information. The documents make the work flow and if they are lost, day-to-day work can be affected seriously. Loss of documents can also mean that you will be unable to enforce your claims in a court of law.

Decision making depends on availability of relevant information. Decision makers look at what happened in the past – the trends and patterns – and project these into the future to decide the best course of action. If information is missing or incomplete because of data loss, the quality of business decisions deteriorates.

Data loss thus has very serious business consequences affecting its profitability and cash flows.

How Do You Prevent Data Loss

It is impracticable to eliminate all the data loss factors outlined earlier. What you can do is to ensure that data losses can be recovered from if it does occur. You do this through:

• Implementing systematic data backup procedures to ensure that data is either backed up online as it is created, or that they are backed up at the end of every work session
• Checking that the backed up data is adequate to reconstruct the records if it becomes necessary. Backups can prove unreliable if done incompletely or without adequate care
• Storing the backup elsewhere, such as on a Web server, so that natural disasters like a fire does not cause their destruction
• Arranging for stable and backup power supply. A stable supply can minimize data losses caused by electrical disturbances, while backup supply can take over if the main supply fails.
• Keeping antivirus and other harmful software out by installing security software
• Keeping hackers out with the help of firewall software
• Training computer operators and administrators to use safe operating practices

What to Do if Data Loss Occurs

Data loss can be aggravated if you continue to work after a problem has occurred. The following precautions can help in making sure that the damage is minimized.

• Stop working when you notice a problem, such as unusual noises from the disk drive
• Do not try to repair any damage unless you are technically proficient in data recovery
• Develop a plan of action to recover the data:
  • Remove damaged media and restore backed up data to new media
  • If the back up is not up-to-date or otherwise unsatisfactory, consider how to recover data from the damaged media
  • If you are not fully confident about your technical expertise, seek the help of a professional data recovery specialist
  • If you do attempt data recovery yourself, first create a mirror image of the damaged media so that it can be entrusted to specialists in case your recovery attempts fail
• Data recovery professionals have dedicated and specialized facilities, such as clean rooms to maximize the possibility of recovering data from damaged disks. Seeking their help could be the best course open to you unless the data damage is insignificant

Data recovery plans must be incorporated into your document management system without fail.

Perhaps the best way to explain Integrated Document Management or IDM is to review the various features of today’s document management practices. A total picture of a technology empowered modern document management system should then emerge.

Modern Data Capture Methods

When computers came into offices, documents were created through data entry from transaction documents such as paper invoices, through the use of application programs such as word processors for correspondence and reports, spreadsheet programs for computational statements and such. These procedures created digital documents that could be managed more efficiently using the computers.

Scanning and Optical Character Recognition software made it possible to transfer paper documents to the electronic document data base. This meant that users could now access even paper documents (or rather their copies) quickly instead of sending a request to the filing section and waiting for the document to arrive.

Several other options are available to capture data in today’s scenario. These include:

• Programming computer controlled machines to generate data online and transfer it to the DMS
• Entering data from the field using handheld devices or POS terminals and transmitting them to the central system
• Reading barcodes on paper documents, packages and even products to generate different kinds of information and transfer it to the system
• Scanning paper forms and transferring form data direct to concerned database fields

Modern Data Storage Methods

Originally, computer documents were stored on tapes or disks, including floppy disks. Then came disk systems with ever increasing storage capacities, and networks where data were stored in a central server, to be accessed by the workstations attached to the network.

Nowadays, data can be stored on the Web, and accessed from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. Documents generated anywhere can also be transferred quickly to this Web database (or content management system). The result was that global corporations with offices all over the world could now function almost like a local office.

Accommodating Documents of Different Kinds and in Different Formats

In addition to text documents, modern businesses work with documents that contain image, audio and video information. All these kinds of information has become an essential part of business content. It follows that an Integrated Document Management system must be able to work with all these kinds of documents in a seamless manner.

Each kind of document can also come in different formats, open standards or proprietary. IDM systems will have to cope with all the formats and generated an integrated flow of information.

What Do Integrated Document Management Systems Achieve?

Integrated document management systems seek to achieve two major objectives:

• Enhance the speed and quality of business processes through efficient workflows. All kinds of data are captured quickly into the system, and processed to generate meaningful information. Databases might be optimized for speedy transaction processing, or for querying and analysis as in the case of data warehouses
• Make knowledge management a reality. In addition to specific querying of all the data in the data warehouse, and reports generated by transaction processing systems, new techniques like data mining seeks to identify patterns that users might be quite unaware of (and might not be able to formulate relevant queries)

The answer is yes, for several reasons.

• Paper documents are difficult to work with. They are stored in a separate filing section, and once stored thus, retrieving a particular document needed for a business process is clumsy and time consuming. Documents in the electronic storage, however, can be accessed instantly, and that too from your own workstation if it is connected to the network server where the documents are stored.
• Paper document storage is not only clumsy and time-wasting but also expensive. You need paper folders, filing cabinet, considerable floor space and an army of paper handlers to manage a paper document storage facility. By converting paper documents into an electronic form, and implementing systematic procedures that authenticate these electronic documents, you can shred most of the paper, thus saving on the storage costs.
• Paper documents are easy to get lost, damaged or fall into the hands of unauthorized persons (who can even be your competitor’s spies) during the frequent handling they are subjected to. On the other hand, access to electronic documents can be restricted through a system of permissions and passwords.

What Are the Alternatives for Document Storage?

In addition to electronic storage on computer media and paper storage in paper folders and filing cabinets (or other containers), you can go in for microfilm document storage. Also, you have different options available under electronic document storage.

Microfilm is one such alternative. Paper documents are photographed into small sized pictures and stored on film rolls. This is durable option, perhaps more durable than even electronic storage that is subject to corruption and damage.

However, microfilm rolls also require significant storage space, and containers for safe storage. You also need specialist staff to keep track of the rolls and their storage locations, as well as for the microfilming and incidental work. Microfilmed records also need a special viewer to view them.

Electronic document storage options involve storage on magnetic tapes, compact magnetic or optical disks and on the Web. Each of these options has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Magnetic tapes, once a low cost option, is not all that attractive now with falling disk costs. Documents stored and tapes can be retrieved only in a serial manner, i.e. you have to unwind the tape to the location where the document is recorded. This is a time consuming process compared to the almost instant access possible with random access disks.

Disks offer ever-increasing storage capacity and today, a thumb sized flash disk can store a million and more documents. A search program can index all the documents and make retrieval of any document a matter of seconds.

Storing documents on the Web, say with a third party service provider or your own dedicated server, makes it possible to access the documents from geographically spread out locations. For a global corporation, this can be a great feature. Web storage is also physically safer compared to storing the documents in-house. (We discuss these in a separate article.)

With al these options, electronic document storage is definitely the best choice today, provided you take care to back up all documents and store the backups safely.

The situation has been transformed dramatically since then.

Computer Networks

Desktops were replaced by networked computer systems. Documents could now be stored in a central server and accessed from any computer attached to the network. The workstations could also access the programs on the server and create documents that went to the server, or were stored on the local computer. A single printer or fax could also now be shared among the computers.

Document management acquired a new dimension along with collaborative working and more intensive use of available facilities.

Network of Networks, the Internet (and Intranet)

With the appearance of the Internet, another dimension was added. Intranets based on Internet protocols, allowed networking across the globe. Documents generated at any of the widely scattered offices of a global corporation could now be made available anywhere else on the Intranet.

This meant that the global corporation could now function almost like a local business. Security of the documents was not compromised because Intranets could restrict access to the documents to authorized persons.

Intranets also enabled the kind of system integration that facilitated online SCM and CRM.

Transferring Paper Documents into the Electronic Workflow

Paper documents could be transferred to the electronic document workflow by scanning and OCR. OCR or optical character recognition converted the text character images into computer readable ASCII and other standard formats.

In a global corporation, for example, all the paper documents received at the offices the world over were scanned by a scanning workstation that completed all the processes up to transferring them to the electronic document store, and even did the indexing.

Indexing and Searching

Another major development was the development of search technology, and its use in electronic document management systems. Millions of documents could now be searched to find particular documents, or information. This could be done in a few seconds.

Databases optimized for querying and analysis facilitated such information research. Managers could identify trends and patterns for making appropriate decisions. Data mining brought unexpected patterns and other meaningful information using the power of computers to identify such patterns.

Remote Data Capture and Access

Data originating in the field had to be brought in some way to the offices with data entry facilities and recorded there. This situation changed with the arrival of handheld devices that could transmit the field data to the main systems. Data were captured on the field and transmitted, often automatically, to the central system.

Data could also be accessed remotely by travelers using their laptops or other mobile devices, and used for various purposes including remote working, presentations to prospective customers and so on.

Electronic data management systems have indeed come a long way. It is almost a wirelessly connected world now, with data being captured and accessed from almost anywhere, and being processed at increasingly faster speeds.