It is a fair question to ask if the paperless office is really just a dream like hover-boards and flying cars or can it be achieved in our lifetimes? The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) a trade group for information professionals has published a paper on this topic earlier this year.

The answer they came up with is not clear cut. The numbers back up the savings for moving to a paperless office. The average business can half the space needed for paper storage. If you have an office in an expensive area are in a prestigious building it is painful to pay premium leasing costs for a box that is just as happy in a storage unit. These savings alone are enough for many companies to look for a document scanning solution.

The speed and accuracy of data retrieval is much faster after the digital conversion. For business like lawyers and accountants who need to look up the history of their clients that is a big benefit. A third of the businesses say it is as much as ten times faster. And in the unfortunate scenario of a subpoena the law requires quick turnover of documents.

The study found that 42% of businesses achieved payback on the project in 12 months. It jumps to 70% at 18 months. This is a great return for any project. But it still worth investigating why 30% of businesses do not achieve a payback on the investment.

So if the payoff is there we should all be paperless by the end of the year right? Well as I have heard before there will be a paperless office right after we have a paperless bathroom.Even after a digitization project, a third of business were printing more paper than before. You can give people an electronic alternative but it is much more difficult to change how people like to work. From most offices the need for paper seems to correlate with the age of the employee.

Maybe it will be our kids who finally run the true paperless office.

Little Red Wagaon (LRW) was hired contracted by Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, to study the records storage of the county. Between 2005 and 2009 the County payed the firm over $900,000 for work. There are now questions of what work was done and if there was impropriety.

In 2010 the FBI began investigating LRW for improper payments from Barton Weidlich who performed work for the company and the county. Former County Clerk of Courts Robert Reilly has already pleaded guilty to laying to the FBI about payments requests to LRW.

The reason LRW was contracted in the first place was to create a records management master plan. The company never provided one and the contract was never renewed. The county has filed a writ with the courts to preserve their right to seek repayment from LRW.

This has the appearance that the records storage budget was being used as a slush fund for graft. For five years the county government ignored the line item. This shows the challenge of the records storage management industry. While important, it is often not near the top of anyone's list. It is often left unnoticed util a problem arises. The $900,000 could have been put to good use and the records storage move forward but instead it has produced nothing but criminals, headaches, and bad PR.

We have focused business and organizations and the best records information management (RIM) practices over the years. But that is just some of the documents that are being stored. Every person has records that need to store for personal reasons. These are all the documents crammed into shoe boxes or in file cabinets in the home office.

These records have a retention schedule just like business records have. There are some that should be saved for legal reasons and some should be kept for functional reasons. However, most of the records that people store are for no reason at all. These can clog up the file cabinet for no reason and may contain sensitive information that can be used to steal an identity.

If the goal is just to save space then document scanners can move everything from paper to digital. This saves space and more importantly, is easy to find, an most importantly, allows you to back it up in an offsite location.

So here are some basic guidelines for personal records retention:

Tax documents - Save for seven years according to most CPAs. But remember there is not statute of limitations for fraud.

Bank Statements - Keep a three month history. The beauty of online banking is that more history is available in a couple of clicks.

Investment Documents - Save reports that show any investment purchases and sales. Monthly and quarterly reports don't hold much value and can be shredded.

Pay Stubs - Everyone likes to save these but they really don't have any value. Keep a three month history and the year end stub. Old ones are dangerous because they contain SS numbers.

Credit Card Statements - If you have a warranty benefit with your card you might want to keep them for big purchases. If there are purchases you can deduct for taxes put them with your tax documents for safeguarding. Otherwise you should always carefully review them for fraud and then shred them.

Home Repairs - Keep receipts for home renovations until you sell the home. Minor repairs need only be saved for ten years.

Medical Forms - Save for five years from date of services rendered. This includes insurance forms.

As valuable as the information stored on company records, they can also pose a tremendous risk. Old records are like nuggets of gold stored in toxic waste. There must be extreme care in their storage and disposal. To help them manage their files, many businesses outsource records storage and paper shredding.

A records storage company provides all the security for the documents. This is the physical security to help prevent the wrong people for accessing them. It also includes safety from physical harms like floods and fires.

A prime example of what can go wrong is the Iowa Department of Department of Human Services. They had a fire at their Indianola office last December. In the clean up an estimated 3,000 files were misplaced. The error was discovered when some of the records blew into a yard. The resident notified the department and they conducted an investigation.

One the files that are required on a day to day basis should be maintained in an office. Official records should be maintained in a safe location with fire suppression. Depending on the type of documents in often times makes sense to use a fire suppression system that uses CO2 and not water. This prevents any damage to the documents.

Iron Mountain has announced the acquisition of three records storage companies. They are File House Offsite Record Storage based in  Fredericksburg, Virginia,  Document Systems based in Columbia, South Carolina,  and First National Safe Deposit based in Philadelphia. The first two focus on box storage while the third has a focus on magnetic tape rotation.

The consolidation of the records storage industry continues. But at the same time more businesses continue to get into the space. I can't see a time when there will be just one or two national options. For many owners this is the most common exit strategy. By selling to Iron Mountain they can convert their equity in the business for cash. So a congratulations to the owners of File House Offsite Record Storage,  Document Systems, and First National Safe Deposit. My the next chapter in their lives be as successful as their last.

The Washington National Records Center (WNRC) is responsible for archiving restricted and secret information. After an inventory that was run between 2007 and 2010 the center found 81 boxes of classified documents as missing. Of the total missing there were 4 classified as top secret, 7 as secret restricted, and 9 as secret.

While only missing 81 boxes out of more than  1,500 is a small percentage it is an unacceptable number when dealing with top secret documents. The only acceptable number is 100% inventory. Only one box contains a couple thousand pages of very sensitive information.

It is unclear whether the boxes were missing or stolen. The FBI has been notified of the missing boxes per Department of Justice requirements.

The WNRC is instituting new procedures to improve security. They are moving away from paper tracking to a bar code system. They cite problems with the current system in tracking boxes in transit.

Every records storage service can appreciate the need to have 100% inventory. With the software packages available to the commercial center it is amazing that top secret documents are kept via paper tags. It seems like the defense department has enough money to update the security of their top secret documents.

When companies convert to paperless office or use document scanning to convert their papers so electronic documents they need to understand how they are going to be using the records going forward. If the documents are just used for historical purposes and don't need to be changed then they can be left as just a digital image.

Alternatively, some businesses plan to alter the documents and use them as active records. If this is the case the digital image must be converted to a text document. This is done through a software application called optical character recognition (OCR). The software analyzes the images and extracts the the words of the text. They have become very accurate over the years and can even work with hand written documents. But messy handwriting will not have the same accuracy as printed text will have. After it is run through the application it is checked for accuracy.

Structured data can also be extracted from the files. This can be with data abstraction that put the data into an electronic document management system like an EHR/EMR. It can also be done to extract data from forms.

Once records are in a text form then can be altered by any document editing program. Common ones would be Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel.