Articles Tagged with: Non-profits

Ensuring Confidentiality in Digitization

Every step in the digitization process involves risks that need to be addressed to protect valuable data from unauthorized access or damage. It is essential that confidentiality be taken seriously when designing a secure system, as even small lapses can have serious consequences.

In this article, we will explore some critical challenges to maintaining confidentiality associated with the digitization process, as well as how we overcome these challenges to offer reliably secure digitization.

What is “Confidentiality?”

Confidentiality is a state of information in which access to it is controlled and only accessible by the right people. To be “confidential,” a file, document, record, or simple piece of knowledge must be known only by or accessible only to those who have permission to know. Something which is common knowledge or readily accessible information cannot be considered confidential.

Thus, importance and secrecy are essential contexts for confidentiality because it’s not worthwhile to ensure the confidentiality of information which is utterly unimportant. If sharing a particular piece of information would have no undesirable consequences, then why go through the trouble of controlling access to it?

Some obvious examples are information related to banking, official identification, or political or corporate secrets. All of these kinds of information are extremely important to many people, and an information leak or loss of confidentiality would have serious consequences for the relevant individuals and groups.

However, information doesn’t need to be broadly important to many people to be worth keeping confidential. All that matters, all that’s required to warrant confidentiality, is some undesired consequence from sharing it.

An individual’s medical record is most likely only important to them and their doctor(s); with a few exceptions, the rest of the world has little to no interest in any one person’s medical history. However, it’s still very important to keep it confidential for the sake of protecting that person’s privacy and their ability to feel comfortable trusting their healthcare service.

Confidentiality in Digitization

When sensitive files need to be digitized, maintaining confidentiality is crucial. After all, information only needs to leak once to no longer be confidential, so it’s important that confidentiality is protected at every step in any process that involves sensitive information.

Essentially, the challenge of maintaining confidentiality can be reduced to the following questions:

Who is authorized to access your files? How can you trust them not to leak, copy, or otherwise steal the information contained within?
How do you stop people who aren’t authorized from accessing your files?

Another way to think of both of these questions is access. If you ensure that the people you allow access to the files are trustworthy and that you can control who has access to the files, then you have achieved information security and can guarantee confidentiality.

Protecting Against Unauthorized Access

Our Solutions for Physical Security

To ensure that our clients’ files are physically secured against unauthorized access, our service bureau is located several stories up in a secure building which features 24/7 on-site security. Employees have to pass through both a keycard lock and a regularly rotated pin number lock to get in.

Visitors are required to sign in upon arrival, are monitored by an employee throughout their visit, and must sign out when departing.

Our Solutions for Digital Security

Cybersecurity risks are not worth gambling on, which is why we keep our entire service bureau network on an isolated (“air-gapped”) intranet. The computers and other equipment used in the digitization process are never connected to the wider internet in any capacity, and all external USB ports are disabled.

Employees are not allowed to store client files on personal devices at any time for any reason, and such personal devices are not allowed to access the isolated network.

Files are only moved from this network via secure removable storage by a few trusted individuals when necessary, such as when being transferred to clients.

In addition to these safeguards, we maintain an active and talented I.T. team to monitor and ensure cybersecurity, including providing training and warnings about phishing attacks to the rest of our team.

Who is Authorized and Why?

In some processes or systems, information can be handled without needing to increase the number of people who have access to it. For example, securely transporting a lockbox of paper files from one place to another does not require allowing transportation personnel access. That information can remain completely sealed throughout.

When digitizing, however, quality assurance personnel need to be able to access the files to perform quality assurance checks and screen for errors. This means that it’s not enough to merely control access to the information, you also need to control…

…which individuals have access (i.e. what kind of individual).
…in which circumstances authorized individuals are granted access.

Our Solutions: Trusted Personnel & Secure Service Bureau

We take great care in selecting and vetting potential records clerks before hiring, ensuring that each successful candidate understands the gravity of the security and confidentiality concerns at play in their new role, including signing non-disclosure agreements and passing a criminal records check.

Even after ensuring that only trustworthy individuals are allowed access to the files we process, we ensure that files never leave our service bureau during processing for any reason. Our personnel have access only to the specific files they’re tasked with processing and are prohibited from using any devices with cameras or other recording equipment while in the service bureau.

Curious?

Consentia has been providing fully customizable digitization solutions to clients in Alberta for decades. In addition to all of the security measures discussed above, we can provide guidance and full transparency throughout the process.

Thinking of getting started on your own digitization project? Contact us with any questions or to set up a free consultation with our specialists, and take the first step toward securely enhancing your information system.

Click here to read more about our past work, our solutions, or our security measures.

March 24, 2023

Information Security and Transportation

In the digital age, we are increasingly turning to digitization for an efficient and convenient way to process information, but it comes with its own set of security and privacy challenges.

Every step in the digitization process involves risks that need to be addressed to protect valuable data from unauthorized access or malicious damage. It is essential that these measures be taken seriously when designing a secure system, as even small lapses can have serious consequences.

In this article, we’ll explore the privacy and security challenges involved in transporting files for digitization. If your files need to be moved from one location to another to be digitized, you and your digitization partner need to find a transportation solution that keeps your files physically safe and confidential throughout the journey.

Why not use a third-party courier?

Depending on the distance they need to travel, one solution could be to ship them via a reputable freight carrier, but this opens them up to physical and confidentiality risks.

While no reputable third-party courier is going to be intentionally reckless with your files, your shipment is one of many they’re transporting that day, and their employees are unlikely to treat it with the same level of care and sensitivity that yours or your digitization partner would.

Are you willing to take the risk that the box might get thrown, dropped, damaged, or lost in the chaos of their complex shipping schedule? The risk may be small, but it would be better not to take it at all.

Additionally, if you’re transporting sensitive confidential files, transporting them through a third-party courier exposes you to the huge security risk that one of their employees could open and read the contents.

For many confidentiality contracts, it’s not enough to minimize the risk by using highly reputable couriers who are unlikely to violate trust, you need to make it impossible for them to do so.

Distance is a problem in itself.

One way to minimize the risk of loss, damage, or security breach during transit is to minimize the amount of time your files have to spend in transit. The further your files have to go, the longer they’ll be at risk.

Of course, the closest option isn’t always the best option, and there’s no point in giving your files the maximum amount of protection during transit if the people who receive them on the other end aren’t going to handle them safely. You do have some flexibility in terms of distance.

On the other hand, while the distance to transport is not the sole deciding factor in choosing a digitization partner, it is still an extremely important one, and sending your files vast distances to be processed by the best option in the country is similarly irresponsible.

No matter how well your files are going to be treated on the other end, it’s not going to matter if they get lost or damaged on the way over.

Depending on the options available to you given your circumstances, it’s generally a good idea to choose a digitization partner who is close enough to your location that the files can be transported within one day’s travel without having to wait in shipping warehouses or risk getting thrown onto a cargo plane.

Our solution: Secure In-house courier.

Consentia employs its own in-house courier to come to retrieve your files from your location, whether you’re located 5 minutes or 5 hours away from us. Our trusted, vetted personnel will make sure that each file is inventoried and secured before leaving your facility.

When transporting especially sensitive or confidential files, we can use lockboxes to keep them safe from physical damage and security breaches throughout the journey.

For digitization services that prioritize security at every step of the process, Get a digitization quote contact us today! Our digitization solutions are tailored to meet your specific needs, including secure, stress-free transportation from your site to ours.

March 17, 2023

How Digital Files Make Organizing Easier

Information is a vital asset to any organization, and its ability to be managed effectively can make or break the success of that organization. However, information on its own is mostly useless until it’s organized.

Organizing and indexing files allows you to more easily find what you’re looking for and summarize a data set for better-informed decision-making. Conversely, having a dataset with all the information you could ever need hiding away in an unstructured collection is almost useless, as you’d need to search through everything to find it.

In this blog post, we’ll explain the basics of indexing, its benefits, and why digital files are easier to organize.

Organizing & Indexing

While this may sound straightforward, it can be very difficult to organize a collection of information well, as there are many different ways it could be organized, some of which are better than others.

Example: Transaction Reports

Imagine an archive of transaction reports (receipts or invoices): you could organize them based on the transaction date, the recipient or sender (transaction partner), the products or services sold, the dollar value of the transaction, or any other number of characteristics.

Once they’ve been sorted into categories based on this initial characteristic, however, they’ll still be disorganized within each of these new categories. To add another layer of organization, you need to sort them based on another feature within each of these categories. For example, once you’ve arranged the transactions by type (receipt or invoice), you could arrange them by date within those categories.

Indexing Schema

These different levels of organization by feature or categories are different indexing levels.

A hierarchy of indexing levels is an indexing schema. For example, when sorting things by name in alphabetical order, your first indexing level is the first letter in the name, so that everything that starts with an “A” comes before everything that starts with a “B,” and so on. When two names both start with “A,” you sort them based on the next indexing level, the second letter, so that “Abe” comes before “Ace,” but both still come before “Bart.”

Finding the best way to organize your files is essentially developing the best indexing schema for your operation.

But how do you determine the usefulness of an indexing level, or, for that matter, of an indexing schema?

Useful Indexing Levels

Any consistent feature with differences within the dataset can be used as an indexing level. The usefulness of an indexing level comes from how broad a distinction it draws and how relevant or useful that distinction is to your organization.

Ex: Distinction without a difference

In our example of a dataset of transaction reports, if they’re all written in English or all using the Canadian dollar, then “language” and “currency type” would not be helpful indexing levels because they wouldn’t sort any files apart from any others. Because these categories don’t represent any differences within the dataset, they have no value.

Similarly, imagine if we one day added one invoice to this collection that happened to be written in French. While “language” might become a useful indexing level for locating that specific file, it still would not be that helpful for the rest of the database.

Ex: Meaningless distinctions

Another category we could use to sort the transaction reports might be the first letter of the first name of the employee who completed the transaction. This would separate our files into 26 different categories, but this difference would be useless because knowing what letter the employee’s first name begins with is completely irrelevant to processing transactions.

These examples are not likely to happen very often in real life, but they show what makes an indexing level useful. The dollar amount, date, and vendor would all be more useful and sensible indexing levels.

Building a useful indexing schema

Once you’ve decided on some useful indexing levels to use in sorting your data, you need to rank them based on priority. Your goal is to make the most useful indexing level the first and the least useful the last.

However, it can be difficult to decide which indexing levels are more useful than the others, as “usefulness” is an unquantifiable, abstract concept. This is why experimenting with different schemas is important, as changing from one to the other lets you see their overall usefulness in practice.

What your specific “best” indexing schema looks like will be unique to your organization’s business model, decision-making practices, and circumstances.

For example, if companies are looking at an advertising database, trying to find the right people to advertise to, they’ll want to advertise to people who have some characteristics relevant to their business offering. “Owns or manages property” is a much more important indexing level to a property maintenance company than to a hair salon. “Income level” would be a somewhat important sorting level for most businesses, but it would be extremely important to a company selling luxury goods.

In general, though, you should try to create a schema that will enable the most efficient file search process.

Indexing in Practice

When creating an indexing schema for a large collection of paper files, the different levels of your schema will determine what goes where. Often times specific indexing levels will be represented by actual physical locations, like when the contents of a filing cabinet or a specific drawer are all one type of file. The iconic cardstock filing folders are another physical representation of an indexing level, each folder a category within it.

The difficulty with physical files is that the “ideal” indexing schema shifts over time with the changing economy and your changing circumstances. By the time you’ve implemented a specific schema, you’re more or less locked into it. Switching to another way of organizing things can mean rearranging hundreds or even thousands of files, which could take days.

Even then, whenever someone needs to locate a file based on a characteristic that isn’t considered in the current schema or isn’t important in it, they’ll need to resort to checking through many files until they find it.

Furthermore, physical implementations of indexing schemas can only go so deep. The more files you have, the more indexing levels you’ll need and the more space they take. Adding new indexing levels means buying more organizing tools like folders and filing cabinets.

Dynamic Digital Indexing

Whereas physical file storage locks you into a specific indexing schema with limited complexity, digital files let you flexibly adjust your schema as you need and allow for practically infinite complexity.

When trying to locate a specific file in physical storage, you’ll need to know where it fits into the entire schema and go through each step to get to it. With digital files, however, you can filter content by the specific feature that matters to you, narrowing the field of search down to the most relevant indexing level immediately without having to go through all the ones that precede it.

A physical indexing system acts as a roadmap that tells you where you need to go to find the file you’re looking for; a good road map will get you there as fast as possible, with the fewest number of steps. But even the best roadmap can’t compare with being able to search for a file name or filter by features, both of which bring the file to you almost instantly.

Digital storage also lets you create as many folders and subfolders as you need, nesting smaller and more specific groupings within larger, broader categories with ease. Don’t like the current arrangement? Creating new folders and moving them around takes almost no time at all, making the switch from one schema to another far less troublesome.

All of these advantages make digital storage far more accessible and useful than physical file storage. On top of that, it’s also cheaper in terms of ongoing costs and adding new files.

Upgrade your information storage by going digital! Consentia has been helping organizations in Alberta and western Canada transform their information systems for decades. We always tailor our solutions to your specific needs, and we provide full consultation and transparency throughout the planning and execution of any project.

Take the first step in enhancing your information system today by getting in touch with our digitization experts. Find out how we can bring your information management to the next level.

March 10, 2023

Benefits of Automated Information Management

Information is the most vital resource any organization has, regardless of its specific operation. Without well-organized and well-distributed information about its goals, circumstances, and resources, an organization can’t operate effectively or respond to new challenges.

Your information management system is the set of procedures and policies that your organization uses to handle, maintain, secure, distribute, and process information in a consistent way. This system could be manual or automatic, physical or digital.

Manual systems use human labour to make frequent simple decisions about sorting, organizing, and processing documents, whereas automated systems let computer programming handle these instead. Automated information management systems are increasingly becoming the norm in modern businesses, and they offer many advantages over manual systems.

The most obvious benefit of automation is cost savings. Employees spend a lot of time on mundane tasks that could be done faster with a machine, and automating these processes can free up their time for more important activities.

Cutting this prolonged simple decision-making out of your employees’ work also reduces stress and burnout. By automating out the tedious parts of their job, you free up more of their time to focus on more important and stimulating activities.

Automation also helps organizations maintain consistency in their information management. With automation, every step of the process is done exactly as it should be, leaving no room for human error or inconsistency across departments or divisions.

In addition to saving time and money, automated systems can also offer increased visibility, scalability, security, and compliance. Information that is automated is generally easier to find, and automation systems can be scaled quickly as your organization grows. Automated systems also increase security by controlling who has access to data and which types of documents are stored.

Finally, automated information management systems allow for better compliance with industry standards and regulations since everything is done in a consistent way.

In short, automating your information management system can help enhance organizational performance, reduce costs and stress, increase security and scalability, and improve compliance. Investing in the right automation system is an essential step for businesses looking to realize their full potential.

The benefits of automated information systems can only be realized, of course, with a digital information infrastructure. Consentia has been providing digital transformation solutions to organizations of all types and sizes for decades.

Through data entry, paper scanning, and film scanning, we turn old paper forms into organized, searchable digital documents that are cheaper and easier to store, secure, and share. We’re proud to provide our fully customizable solutions with maximum transparency and any guidance and consultation you may need.

Get a digitization quote to speak with one of our digitization experts about how we can help you elevate your information management system.

March 3, 2023

5 Steps for Offering Remote Work

In an increasingly digital world, offering flexible work options such as remote work and hybrid work has become essential for businesses to stay competitive. Remote and hybrid work have been shown to increase employee satisfaction, productivity, job performance, and overall workplace efficiency.

By providing employees with the option of working remotely or in a hybrid environment, employers can ensure that their workforce is engaged and motivated while also fostering collaboration between teams.

As more companies begin to offer these types of flexible work options, employers need to understand how best to accommodate them to stay competitive in the talent market. This article will provide step-by-step guidance on how employers can start offering remote and hybrid work opportunities for their employees.

Step 1 – Plan Ahead

The importance of planning cannot be overstated when it comes to transitioning all or part of your business to remote or hybrid work. Establishing a plan is the first step employers should take to ensure that the transition is successful and that employees are comfortable with their new working methods.

First, employers should assess their existing business processes to determine which ones may be well-suited for remote or hybrid work and how they can best be transitioned.

Processes requiring constant, active collaboration may not be best suited to remote work, whereas more focused, individual work-based functions would likely be more compatible.

Step 2 – Communicate With Employees

Company-wide announcement

Communication is critical when transitioning to a remote or hybrid work environment. Once employers have identified the processes that will transition, they should notify those employees who will be able to work from home of the upcoming change.

It’s important to think about how your employees will respond to this option becoming available. The circumstances of the pandemic made most workers familiar with remote work, and many found that they preferred it.

However, some workers found that remote work did not work for them. Whether due to increased distractions, laxer routines, or decreased social interactions, these workers didn’t enjoy working from home and aren’t going to be excited about doing it again.

These differing workplace preferences are why it’s so important to frame this change as an expansion of workplace flexibility, not as a broad transition to remote work. While many employees would welcome the opportunity to work from home, those who prefer the office might dread it. It’s essential to ensure everyone understands that no one will be forced to work from home if they don’t want to.

Individual adjustment

Managers should decide how to frame the transition to flexible work depending on each individual employee to maximize productivity.

Some employees might be too eager to escape the expectations and monitoring of the office environment, and remote work for them might result in decreased productivity. To these employees, managers should emphasize that flexible work options are being adopted to boost productivity, not reduce it and that their productivity will be monitored regardless of where they choose to work.

Other employees might refuse the offer of flexible work options out of hand because they see it as less legitimate or less desirable, and they want to maintain a good reputation with their employer, even if they might be more productive working remotely. To these employees, managers should emphasize that productivity is more important than being present in the office and that they should choose to work where they’re the most productive.

In general, just like with any significant change, managers should keep a close eye on their team’s productivity and stress levels so they can help them through the transition to hybrid work or encourage them to stay at the office if it seems that working remotely doesn’t work for them.

Step 3 – Expand Your Digital Infrastructure

Depending on the size of your workforce and how much of your operation will be going remote, you may be headed for a huge increase in digital information usage. Adding a substantial number of roles and processes to your digital infrastructure could strain your existing bandwidths, and the transition of processes which weren’t previously digital may require adopting some new tools and programs.

Make sure your IT team is involved in the transition process, not just accepting orders from above. Ask for feedback, advice, and guidance in making decisions about how this transition is going to unfold.

Step 4 – Go Fully Digital

Remote work is worthless if the information employees need to work with is still stuck in paper formats.

If you have a backlog or archive of paper files taking up space in your office, it’s best to get all of that information into a digital format just in case it needs to be referenced by a remote employee. A backfile digitization project will make sure that all your information is accessible and secure.

If you have an ongoing process which still utilizes paper, set up a day-forward digitization process so that information makes it into your information system as quickly as possible.

Plus, digitizing your information brings a huge number of benefits beyond just making it compatible with remote work. Digital information systems are more secure, efficient, accessible, and reliable than large paper archives.

Consentia offers custom-tailored digitization solutions to organizations of any type and size. We’ve been doing backfile, day-forward, and many other kinds of projects for decades, and we’d love to help guide you through your digital transformation. Get a digitization quote!

Step 5 – Reassess Your Commercial Real Estate

Once your employees start shifting to remote work, see how many people tend to use your office space regularly. If your organization owns or leases a large amount of office space, the switch to flexible work options could free up a lot of it, depending on how many people decide to work from home and how often.

A substantial decrease in regular occupancy could allow your organization to downsize its office(s) while remaining just as effective. This would allow you to cut a large amount of cost on rent and utilities. For example, IBM, McKesson, Nortel, and several other major US companies report having saved millions of dollars in real estate and other costs after transitioning to flexible work options.

However, some costs of downsizing need to be considered as well.

Reducing your office space too early could be disastrous if some employees decide to return to the office after giving remote work a try and finding that it wasn’t their preference. Workplace flexibility means offering employees both options, so any day that your office space can’t accommodate all of the workers who want to be there is a day that you’re not actually offering workplace flexibility.

Additionally, although downsizing to shared desk spaces might save on space, it could result in some employees disliking the new arrangement and feeling less connection with the company, as there won’t be a personal workspace to call their own.

Another way to adjust to more remote work might be to rearrange the office layout, allocating the newly freed-up space to collaborative workspaces like conference rooms or community tables. One of the primary advantages of working from the office is in-person collaboration and meetings, which are generally preferred by many workers to online meetings.

In any case, make sure you take some time after implementing flexible work options to see how things settle out before making any big changes.

Conclusion

In conclusion, offering flexible work options is a great way for employers to save costs while still keeping their employees happy.

Remote workers need access to digital information to do their jobs effectively, so it’s important that organizations make sure they have the right infrastructure and programs in place before transitioning any of their processes. Additionally, if your organization owns or leases office space, you should consider downsizing after implementing flexibility as long as doing so won’t detract from the employee experience.

Creating an effective workplace flexibility plan requires careful consideration of both cost savings and employee satisfaction; however, if it’s done correctly can be incredibly beneficial for everyone involved.

February 24, 2023

Remote Work is Here to Stay

This March, it will have been three years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and, thus, three years since the explosion of remote and hybrid work.

Remote work was nothing new before this. Decision-makers and digital-industry professionals have taken advantage of technologies that enable remote work as long as they’ve been available, staying on top of their work from their home office, while waiting at airports, or in hotel rooms while on business trips.

Remote work has also enabled international and inter-regional collaboration between organizations for decades, expanding the horizon of viable partners and clients to include any organization with reliable internet access, no matter where they are in the world.

When the lockdowns hit, however, the number of people working remotely increased exponentially. It had to increase if the economy was going to keep moving without endangering millions of lives.

In a matter of days, the portion of the economy working remotely ballooned from a small handful of important decision-makers, writers, and I.T. professionals to everyone who could possibly do their job from home.

Nearly three years later, after the release of vaccines, fluctuating mask mandates, and long after the last official lock-down restrictions, many people have come back to the office to work. But not all of them, not even close.

What has the pandemic taught us?

The necessary experiment with remote work that happened during the pandemic has yielded some interesting outcomes, both for society at large and for individuals:

The full potential of remote work was explored and expanded.

Employers had to figure out how to keep their employees working despite the circumstances. If a job could possibly be done remotely, it was. If not, workers either had to work in person (essential workers) or find other ways of paying the bills.

The pressure on employers to stay afloat with a physically decentralized workforce resulted in innovative new operational methods and organizational restructuring.

The pressure on individuals and organizations whose line of work was not compatible with an online business resulted in creative new software and remote business models, expanding the industry.

Organizations had to re-assess the value of their commercial property.

“How much was having an office space really contributing to our effectiveness?” For some, the experiment with remote work showed just how important a physical workspace is for their business model. Others found out that businesses could carry on more or less the same without physical office space and are still running entirely remotely.

Traditionally, physical office space was usually seen as a normal and even legitimizing part of doing business. But the pandemic showed that not only is a fully remote business both viable and legitimate, but most already viable and legitimate operations can be made fully or mostly remote.

Individuals have learned whether remote work works for them.

For some individuals, remote work was a silver lining in scary times.

Working from home meant no more commuting to and from work, complete control over their work environment, and a much more flexible work schedule that allowed them to handle chores between work tasks.

Some working parents especially value remote work, as it allows them to keep an eye on their children while working, cutting out childcare costs.

For others, though, remote work made everything worse.

While some saw the elimination of their commutes as time saved, others saw it as a ritual that was no longer providing structure and routine in their day.

While some preferred to work in a comfortable environment that they control, others found it hard to be productive surrounded by distractions and in a space also used for leisure.

While parents of older, more self-sufficient children may have preferred working nearby, younger children who need more active childcare became a huge strain on their parents’ stress and productivity.

Conclusion

The important thing for organizations to keep in mind is that the general workforce from which they want to attract talent now knows just how well or poorly remote work works for them. In a broad sense, the pandemic changed the labour market by revealing, creating, and solidifying simultaneous demands for in-office and remote work among workers.

In fact, a recent survey by financial advisory firm Hardbacon revealed that over 80% of Canadians in remote or hybrid work arrangements would rather find a new job than go back to the office if required by their current employers.

In some sense, this isn’t surprising. When the pandemic lockdowns hit, they shattered the traditional view that legitimate or “normal” work arrangements are being exclusively in-person. This revealed new options to the wider workforce: hybrid and remote work; and it seems like they’re here to stay.

The implications for companies wanting to transition more of their workforce back to in-person is that they’re likely to run up against serious resistance and should perhaps consider alternative ways of boosting productivity.

Prospectively, however, organizations looking to attract new talent need to keep in mind that, where they are practically feasible, hybrid and remote work options are highly desirable employment features for many workers.

However, accommodating remote and hybrid work options is easier said than done for many organizations. While newer companies probably started with full digital integration, many larger, older organizations are still reliant on information stored in paper and possibly even microfilm records.

While physical information formats may sound like a minor issue, accessing, securing, sharing, and duplicating these records is far more expensive and time-consuming than it would be with digital records.

30 years ago, the digital revolution introduced computers and other digital technology to the business landscape.

In 2020, the pandemic introduced remote work as a consistent demand from workers, which has, in turn, made digital integration a necessity for any competitive business or effective organization.

Consentia offers fully custom-built digitization and digital integration solutions for any organization or business, with full transparency and expert guidance. Transitioning your data and information infrastructure into the digital world opens up numerous benefits and opportunities.

Whether you want to increase your ability to offer remote and hybrid work options, securely preserve your information for the future, or leverage powerful communication and analysis tools, our digitization experts would love to help you accomplish your goals.

February 10, 2023

Disaster Preparedness: Protect Your Information

Disasters can come in many different forms, from natural disasters like floods and earthquakes to security breaches and catastrophic technological failures. Regardless of the type of disaster, they all have one thing in common: they can cause serious damage to an organization’s data, information infrastructure, and reputation. The difficulty is made even worse if the data you lose or the infrastructure that’s compromised would have been critical to your recovery and damage control efforts.

That’s why it is so important for organizations to be prepared for a disaster before it happens. Disaster preparedness involves taking steps such as strengthening security measures, creating backups of important data, and developing a plan for recovering operational capacity quickly after a disaster occurs. In this article, we will discuss some of the ways that organizations can prepare for a few broad types of disasters.

Technological Disasters

Technology can be a great help to businesses and organizations, but it can also bring its own set of potential risks and disasters. When technological systems fail, the results can be catastrophic for a business. Outages, data loss, system crashes, or power surges can cause serious disruption to operations and lead to long-term damage.

In the past, the only organizations that needed to prepare for technology failures were those whose operation was centred around information or computing. More than 30 years into the digital age, however, nearly every organization larger than a family business utilizes some form of digital technology in their core business processes.

More than just being common, integrating digital tech and the internet into your operation is functionally required if you want to be competitive. Without some kind of internet presence or the ability to send and receive information digitally, you’ll have trouble doing business or partnering with most other organizations.

What this ubiquitous dependence on technology means for today’s organizations is that every one of them needs to be prepared for a tech failure. What would happen if a power surge hit your head office? How much would an extended blackout disrupt your operation, and how badly? What other options do you have?

The specific steps your organization will need to take to prepare for a tech disaster are going to depend on your unique circumstances, but here are some good first steps:

Ensure all of your computers are on surge-protected power lines. With modern electrical infrastructure serious power surges are relatively rare, but they do still happen from time to time. When they do, they’re impossible to see coming, so it’s best to be prepared, just in case.
Ensure that all of your critically important technology, that is, the machines and systems you can’t live without, are somehow replaceable. Odds are that the most important tools in your operation aren’t particularly cheap, but you should have a backup plan if you were to somehow suddenly lose them.

Catastrophic Mistakes

Everyone makes mistakes now and then. Usually, those mistakes are relatively minor, like spilling your coffee on your clothes before a meeting. Sometimes, however, a mistake can be a lot more serious, like losing millions in a phishing scam.

While mistakes of this severity are rare, it would be unwise to pretend that they’re impossible. It’s bad enough when a catastrophic human error costs your organization a large amount of money or time, so it’s best not to compound that crisis by not having procedures to respond to them.

As much as possible, and at every level of management, try to consider Murphy’s law in each critically important business operation, and encourage your managers to do the same in their own domains. The point is not to become paranoid about every possible problem, but by deliberately considering each possible mistake you will probably come across possibilities you hadn’t considered before.

Security Disasters

Security disasters can be especially costly for organizations. Security threats range from cyber-attacks, data breaches, and malicious software to insider threats, identity theft and even physical security threats. In the worst scenarios, these disasters can cause severe damage to a business’s reputation and finances and may lead to long-term operational disruptions.

To protect against security disasters, organizations need to have robust security policies and procedures in place. Security protocols should cover every aspect of the business’s digital infrastructure, including devices that access the internet, local networks, mobile phones and other devices.

Organizations can also benefit from investing in strong anti-virus software, firewalls, two-factor authentication and encryption technology to protect against malicious activity. Security policies should also include training for staff members on how to identify suspicious activity, as well as regular security audits and assessments.

By investing in these disaster preparedness measures, organizations can better protect their data and operations from potential disasters. By being proactive in protecting their information, organizations can minimize the risks of suffering a disaster and help ensure their long-term success.

Natural Disasters

Natural disasters can have a profound impact on an organization and their ability to protect and recover its information. Extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and wildfires, can cause catastrophic damage to businesses – not only in terms of the physical property but also in terms of the data they possess. Data loss due to natural disasters is often caused by a lack of power, damaged or destroyed hardware, or even the inability to access the premises.

Organizations should have a plan in place that outlines how they will protect their data and operations during natural disasters. This could include investing in reliable backup systems, hosting cloud-based backups and replicating key datasets offsite so that they can be accessed in the event of a disaster.

Natural disasters are the hardest to predict and prepare for, so the most reliable way to protect your information is to distribute backups in more than one physical or digital location. If your organization still primarily relies on physical formats for its information storage, it’s taking an unnecessary risk. Digital information storage comes with a host of benefits, but the most important is the ease with which you can duplicate and distribute digital files. Compared to almost instantly uploading or copying a digital file, duplicating physical files is expensive, time-consuming, and bad for the environment.

Contact us today to find out how digitization can elevate your organization and keep your information safe, even in the worst-case scenario.

January 20, 2023

The Costs of Poor Information Management (Part 2)

Part 2: The Latent Costs

In the last part, we discussed what poor information management looks like in practice and some of the direct, immediate costs. There are two more things that organizations lose due to poor information management, but which are not directly tied to one of those four pillars: cohesion and reputation.

These are not small, immediate, direct costs of poor information management, such as delays in service or correspondence, but the way that relevant individuals react to those immediate costs.

Organizational Cohesion

We have already discussed organizational unity and coordination in the section on information distribution in part one. There, these terms referred to the ability of an organization’s constituents to function together, a question which is concrete, behavioural and operational.

Organizational Cohesion, on the other hand, has less to do with concrete behaviours and more to do with attitudes.

When an organization collects too little valuable information or too much useless information (poor acquisition), it becomes more difficult to organize and secure (making poor custodianship more likely) and, thus, more difficult to distribute properly.

Employees or members who want to do their jobs well will understandably become frustrated if they are not equipped with the information they need to be most effective. Such frustration is often attributed, fairly or unfairly, to other members or departments of the organization, thus building resentment and distrust between members.

Those members who intrinsically believe in the organization itself and want to see it succeed will be alienated and discouraged by what seems like avoidable dysfunction and may even lose their faith in the organization.

Members frustrated by the dysfunction that results from poor information management will either seek success elsewhere or try to reform the organization (if they have the means). Such reform efforts can be the solution to the dysfunction, but this requires that enough members agree that such reform is actually necessary and that there is no irresolvable disagreement between them about what those reforms should look like.

Without agreement about the need for reform, reformers will be pitted against non-reformers, creating more frustration and resentment. Disagreement about how to reform the organization will also create frustration and resentment. Furthermore, even if everyone can agree about the solutions needed, there’s a chance that they will be the wrong solutions, worsening the problems that caused all of this discord in the first place and thus leading to further dissonance.

Of course, these problems are not unfixable, and many stable organizations go through successive periods of stagnation and reform, and the dissonance and then cohesion that results. But it’s clearly better to avoid or minimize these problems as much as possible by maintaining strong and reliable information and document management systems; prevention is better than a cure.

Reputation

Information management is far from the only thing affecting your organization’s reputation. Still, as a potential source of problems and the means by which you address problems, IM deserves special attention.

As already discussed, poor IM limits the effectiveness of your organization. This immediate cost results in a latent cost on your reputation with partners, clients/customers, and your most motivated employees.

The impact on your business partners and clients/customers is obvious: poor quality service or products won’t go unnoticed and will factor into their future decisions about whether to work with or buy from your organization in the future.

The impact on your most motivated employees doesn’t get as much consideration, however. Most members of an organization are motivated (at least to some extent) by money, career progress, and status. But some personally identify with the organization, making its success and mission their own.

While intrinsically motivated employees are valuable, they are also more likely to be alienated by dysfunction than those motivated primarily by compensation or career status.

An employee who comes to work only for a paycheck is likely to roll their eyes at frustrating dysfunction at work, do the best job they can under the circumstances, and then go home and forget about it at the end of the day.

Employees that want the best for the organization, on the other hand, face a conflict between their identification with it and the dysfunction they perceive. Some will resolve this by trying to reform the organization from within, but only if they believe that they can have an impact. Those who perceive the problems as insurmountable or their own potential impact as too limited to make a difference; these members are likely to stop identifying with the group entirely.

This internal loss of reputation can thus lead to higher turnover and greater difficulty attracting top talent.

Information Management Issues are System-Issues

Every organization has an information management system, even if it’s not deliberate or formalized. Your organization needs to put most pieces of information it acquires through multiple steps and personnel for it to be as useful as possible (e.g. receiving a document online or by mail -> filing it appropriately -> distributing it to those who need it -> eventual destruction).

Problems in one area tend to cascade into others, eventually spreading throughout the system. Delays and mistakes made at any point will accumulate as the information progresses through the processing system, slowing down the organization’s responses and decisions.

This interconnectedness means that small problems which are ignored will gradually develop into larger ones and that these larger problems take a long time to resolve, as they need to be uprooted at every stage in the system.

The result for an organization’s leadership is that these sorts of smaller problems need to be taken seriously and addressed early on; to be recognized for what they are: the start of something bigger.

Digitization makes excellent information management easier.

It can be easy to think of poor information management as merely the result of poor decision-making and negligence by an organization’s leadership, especially in the abstract, and especially when considering another organization and not one’s own.

The unfortunate reality that many organizations eventually face is that information management problems sometimes arise due to factors outside of your control. A limited budget prevents onboarding more staff; honest and unforeseeable mistakes create new problems or worsen existing ones; or unexpected crises arise, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which challenged every organization in new ways.

No matter how well your organization has handled information throughout its history, the future is unpredictable, and responsible leaders need to take steps to prepare for whatever may come their way.

One way to enhance organizational resiliency is to move to a strong digital information management system. Systems dependent on paper involve longer and more frequent delays, greater space requirements, greater risk of information loss, and greater ongoing costs in paper and printing.

Digital systems are more secure, require far less space to store large amounts of information, and allow you to send and receive files instantly or work on them remotely. All of these features save you resources and give you and your team more options.

If your information management system is dependent on paper, or if your archives are buried in outdated microfilm formats, digitizing these files with Consentia is a great way to increase organizational flexibility. Leverage all the benefits of digital information systems by getting in touch with one of our experts today!

January 13, 2023

The Costs of Poor Information Management (Part 1)

Good records and document management are essential for any organization to be successful. Records and documents provide the foundation for decision-making, legal compliance, operational efficiency, continuity of operations, organizational learning and knowledge sharing.

Without good information practices and policies in place, an organization will be less responsive, effective and cohesive. Records management is the practice of identifying, organizing, preserving and disposing of records, as well as providing access to them when needed.

Part 1: What does poor records management look like?

Records need to be managed throughout their entire lifecycle, which includes four parts: acquisition; custodianship; distribution; disposal. Here’s what good and bad information and records management look like at each stage.

Acquisition – How do you get your information?

Acquisition is the first part of the lifecycle of records and documents, and it is a critical step in making sure that information management practices are effective. Records acquisition entails the identification, selection and collection of records – both physical and electronic – with the aim of capturing as much relevant information as possible while distinguishing it from unnecessary, irrelevant information that won’t be helpful.

Collection can be either passive, as in making it possible for people who want to send you helpful information to do so, or active, as in researching and seeking out valuable information to inform executive decisions and organizational policy.

Bad Acquisition either involves not enough collection or collection of the wrong information (or both). When it comes to passive acquisition, organizations need to try to minimize barriers to incoming valuable information while creating and strengthening barriers against useless information.

So, for example, it should not be difficult for customers to volunteer information to enhance their shopping experiences, such as their preferences or contact information. Or what if a business partner wants to send you documents and information about an exciting development in your partnership?

Not only should it be easy for either to give you this information, should they choose to do so, but the means by which you passively collect it need to be secure and well organized. The customer entrusts your organization with this information under the implicit assumption that you will be able to keep it safe and that it will be used to their benefit. The business partner needs to be able to rely on the security and responsiveness of your shared communication channels to be confident in the partnership. None of this is possible if either of these kinds of information gets lost in a disorganized information management system.

But good collection practices aren’t merely about ease of receiving information. You wouldn’t want a random stranger to be able to get a hold of members of your leadership team to waste their time. You also don’t want to be flooded with an endless amount of useless information. Not only would this waste your storage space and time, but it also makes it harder to identify and access important incoming information.

Good Acquisition = high quantities of high-quality information + low quantities of low-quality information + high-quality organization of that information.

Custodianship – How do you store and protect your information?

Custodianship is the second pillar of information management, and it refers to the practice of storing, protecting, and maintaining records and documents within an organization. It can involve both physical and digital storage, as well as backup strategies for protecting against unintentional or malicious destruction of information.

Records custodians are responsible for ensuring that all the information an organization has acquired is secured, organized, and accessible when needed.

Bad Custodianship can lead to a few different types of disasters for organizations. Records get lost in an unorganized storage system due to poor indexing or failure to establish procedures for the retrieval of information. Records can also be lost due to a lack of information security and backup strategies. Records can also become inaccessible due to technical problems, such as an inability to retrieve them from storage media.

These risks are especially heightened if an organization is storing records in multiple physical and digital formats, which can lead to different access and security protocols for different types of records. Records can also become vulnerable to unauthorized access and manipulation if they are stored on unsecured servers or networks.

All of these risks can lead to an inability to respond effectively, both internally and externally. Records may be lost or tampered with, leading to legal trouble or a lack of trust between parties. Records become inaccessible, leading to delays in decision-making or communication. Records may also be erased due to negligence or malicious intent.

Good Custodianship = secure storage systems + robust access protocols + backup strategies that include both physical and digital media.

Distribution – How do you get the right information to the right place?

The third pillar of information management is distribution. This refers to the process of getting the right information to the right place, person, or group in an efficient and secure manner. Records management systems enable organizations to distribute digitally stored documents and records quickly and securely while also ensuring they are signed off on by the appropriate personnel.

Distribution processes that are badly managed can lead to a few different types of issues. Records may be sent to the wrong person due to inaccurate or out-of-date addresses and contact information. Records may also not reach their destination if they are sent via an unsecured medium, leading to data leakage or theft. Records may not be tracked properly, leading to confusion over who has access to the information and where it is located. Records may also not be signed off on by the appropriate personnel, leading to potential legal issues or miscommunication.

One way to think about any organization is as a decision-making machine. Members at every level of authority, from executive leadership all the way down to front-line employees, are constantly making decisions about the best way to achieve their goals and get their jobs done. Poor distribution of information within an organization starves each decision-making unit of the information they need to make the right choice, forcing them to delay or make poorly informed choices.

This also means greater disunity and poorer coordination as an organization. If lower-level decision-makers (i.e. employees and middle managers) have to make decisions without good information or delay a decision until the information reaches them, it makes them less predictable to upper and executive management. Without knowing what circumstances and choices confront your subordinates, your leadership will be less decisive.

Good Distribution = accurate contact information + secure data transmission protocols + efficient tracking systems.

Disposition – Where does your information go when you’re done with it?

The fourth pillar of information management is disposition. Disposition refers to whatever happens to a record or document once it has outlived its usefulness. Destruction of the record is a common choice, so common that the two terms are often used synonymously. But choosing to archive a record for posterity also counts as disposition.

Organizations collect information for specific purposes, and once this purpose expires, it can be easy to forget about it. Many organizations have hard drives or filing cabinets filled with an increasingly disorganized array of old documents, much of which could be disposed of without sacrificing any important information.

As already stated, archiving old documents which are no longer useful is a legitimate choice for disposition. However, passively accumulating an ever-growing collection of files because no one takes the time to organize them or separate them from more current information is not archiving; it’s hoarding.

However an organization chooses to dispose of their documents, its solution needs to be active and informed.

Active and informed disposition policy means re-evaluating a record and whether it should be retained before it becomes a problem. One way to do this is to make setting a review date for each record part of the standard acquisition process.

Active and informed archiving of old records means separating them by degrees of relevance so that those kept merely for posterity don’t crowd out those that may need to be referenced in the near future. It also means maintaining an organized archive with helpful metadata conventions.

Active and informed destruction means understanding the retention policies and regulations of your jurisdiction and when those legislations allow you to destroy the record, as well as why this record will not be useful to the organization in the future. Once the decision to destroy a record is reached, it also means ensuring and confirming that the destruction is total so that information security is not compromised.

The costs of poor disposition practices are information security vulnerability and storage inefficiency, one of which is far more troubling and urgent than the other, and for good reason. However, neglecting the health of your information storage for a long enough time can lead to serious problems too.

Digitization makes Excellent Information Management Easier

When thinking about poor information management in the abstract or in another organization, it can be easy to think of such problems as merely the result of poor decision-making and negligence by an organization’s leadership.

If that were the case, all you would have to do to avoid those problems is pay attention and make better choices.

The unfortunate reality that many organizations eventually find themselves in is that information management problems often arise due to factors outside of their control.

A limited budget prevents onboarding more staff; honest and unforeseeable mistakes create new problems or worsen existing ones; or unexpected crises arise, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which challenged every organization in new ways.

If your information management system is dependent on paper or if your archives are buried in outdated microfilm formats, digitizing these files with Consentia is a great way to increase organizational flexibility. Leverage all the benefits of digital information systems by getting in touch with one of our experts today.

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