Articles Tagged with: Retail

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 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.

January 6, 2023

Downsizing with Digitization

With prices rising and office space getting more expensive in most major cities, many organizations are looking to downsize their office space to save on costs, increase efficiency, or prepare for future growth. This often involves removing unnecessary office furniture, making individual workspaces more collaborative, and/or incorporating more hybrid and remote work options for employees. But another way to save space that may not be as obvious is moving away from paper.

When considering storage problems, paper documents are usually not the first thing that comes to mind for many of us. After all, a few sheets of paper only occupy a tiny amount of space; even a hundred pages are almost nothing. But as many office managers know, paper files can start to pile up quickly. Whether they’re kept in boxes, drawers, or filing cabinets, large volumes of paper documents take up space that could be used more effectively. If these collections are regularly accessed, they’ll require constant maintenance to keep them organized, draining valuable employee time and energy.

But you have that paper for a reason. The information contained in those pages is valuable, and it’s not like you can just throw them away. That’s where digitizing comes in. By turning your paper files into digital documents and storing them on a local hard drive or a cloud storage server, you can massively condense the amount of space they require while also opening them up to a huge number of other benefits, like remote access, a variety of organizational tools, and better security options.

There are two ways to digitize your paper files and clear up space: scanning and data entry.

Paper Scanning

Using specialized scanning equipment, you can quickly turn many paper pages into digital images or pdf documents. This option is great for text documents and diagrams, especially when used in conjunction with Optical Character Recognition software, which allows a computer to recognize the text in the image, letting you highlight, copy and paste, or search through it with ease.

While this may sound like something you could just as easily accomplish with a photocopier, specialized scanning machines can process stacks of pages far faster than flat-bed scanners like photocopiers. This makes them perfect for larger projects with hundreds or even thousands of documents.

With top-of-the-line equipment and refined digitization processes, Consentia can process large collections quickly and efficiently. We can also scale our operation to match our clients’ budgets and needs, and our experienced scanning specialists can adapt to your organization’s specific needs.

Data Entry

If the information in your paper files is standardized or quantitative, you’ll probably want to aggregate that data into an organized spreadsheet at some point. Spreadsheets organize all of the important information into one place, making sophisticated analysis and visualizations possible.

Scanning pages only creates digital copies, which is great for text documents but isn’t very helpful with raw data. That data needs to be extracted from the documents and then aggregated before it can be useful.

The value of manual Data Entry digitization is that operators digitize files while simultaneously extracting and aggregating important information. This makes the process simpler and more efficient than scanning and extracting/aggregating afterwards. It’s also more efficient in terms of digital storage space, as it doesn’t require you to temporarily store full images of pages before aggregation.

Consentia’s manual data entry services are scalable, adaptable to your specific requirements, and always double-checked to ensure accuracy.

You can drastically reduce storage space requirements by digitizing your paper files while unlocking access to advanced organizational tools and improved security options. Scanning and data entry are both viable options for digitizing paper documents, with each providing specific benefits that make them more suitable in different situations. No matter what method you choose, Consentia can help you digitize your files quickly, efficiently and securely.

If you’re ready to start downsizing storage requirements in your office, contact Consentia today! Our experienced team is ready to answer any questions you may have and get started on your project. Get in touch today for a free quote!

December 16, 2022

How to Prepare for an Office Move

Packing up your office and moving it to another location is always a complicated process, but being well prepared can reduce the likelihood of complications and problems, saving you time, money, and stress.

Choose the right moving company.

Depending on your organization’s size and industry, you may be able to move your office without the assistance of a specialized moving company. However, just because it is an option doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best option. You may spend more money doing it yourself, in labour costs and lost productivity than it would have cost to contract a dedicated mover. In any case, it’s best to consider all your available options before deciding.

Here are just a few of the many options for moving companies here in Edmonton:

Company	Google Business Rating	Benefits*
Alta Moving	4.8 stars (125 reviews)	Also offers seacans, portable offices, and portable and traditional storage options Packing services included Disposal of large items included Free rental of 25 moving boxes with a quote
Action Moving	4.7 stars (462 reviews)	Nearly 35 years of experience Additional services available: site survey, layout optimization, file cabinet anchoring and levelling, and more
Office Move Pro	4.7 stars (31 reviews)	Manufacturer-certified office installers Climate-controlled storage space available in Edmonton GPS vehicle tracking
AMJ Campbell	4.5 stars (183 reviews)	Over 85 years in business Over 500,000 businesses moved Additional services available: space planning, furniture consultation, disassembly and reassembly, and more
Right Move	4.1 stars (152 reviews)	Also offer moving consulting services Off-hours moving services to get the job done after business hours and on weekends if necessary
Alberta Top Notch Movers	4.1 stars (55 reviews)	No hidden fees 15-minute billing Over ten years of experience Packing services included Optional storage space

*As described by the business on the website linked here

Ultimately, we can’t decide which moving company will be right for you and your situation. It’s best to get in touch with moving companies early, get a quote, and discuss how their process works. For a large complicated move to go smoothly, everyone involved should feel comfortable working and coordinating with each other.

Plan ahead, plan well.

As the old saying goes: “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Planning ahead helps you anticipate potential obstacles and come up with viable solutions before you need them. The larger your office is and the more things you need to transport, the more complicated your process will be, and thus, the more preparation and planning you should do. Here are some steps you can take to ensure things go smoothly:

1) Take Inventory

Moving can often be an excellent opportunity to reset your layout and make everything more organized on the other end of the process. But it can also become a chaotic headache with paper files and other items getting lost or further disorganized. The best way to prevent this is to ensure everything is organized ahead of time.

One of the first steps you’ll need to complete is taking everything out of your filing cabinets, desk drawers, and other storage locations and putting them in more portable moving boxes. This is an excellent opportunity to go through each storage location and ensure everything is stored in a way that makes sense. If you have any collections of unsorted, miscellaneous files, now is a great time to sort their contents into the appropriate boxes since everything is moving and rearranging.

While it may feel like keeping everything inside and sealing the doors on these furniture pieces would be the simpler way to go, most of them are designed for storage, not transport. This means they are likely too heavy or awkwardly balanced to be safely and conveniently transported with their contents inside. You’re better off moving everything into well-organized, labelled moving boxes, which your moving crew can carry or stack easily.

As files and folders are moved from cabinets and drawers into moving boxes, task a member of your organization, or a team of members, to record which folders went into which containers. Indexing boxes by department, floor, or some other grouping schema can also be helpful with large offices (e.g. “Box 1-1” for the first box of floor/department one).

Once all your files are sorted, compile the records of what went where into a comprehensive inventory of your files. At the end of the process, you’ll use this inventory document to confirm that nothing went missing, so hold onto it.

2) Condense the furniture

Once all the drawers and cabinets are empty, start packing all the non-essential furniture tightly into a back corner. This will free up space for walking past and give you a sense of how much space your items occupy when packed tightly together. That, in turn, will help you choose the right-sized moving truck and estimate the number of trips you’ll have to make.

While efficiency is important, you can’t forget about safety, so make sure that any stacked furniture is arranged safely. Freeing up a few extra square feet of walking space by stacking heavy objects too high isn’t worth the risk of damaging them or, more importantly, injuring your staff or moving crew.

3) Conduct a safety walkthrough

Once everything is stacked safely to the sides and prepared for the move, walk through the whole office one last time with a few members of your team, ideally anyone who will be involved in the moving process. Start from the entrance to the office and work your way through every walkway, looking for any potential hazards as a team.

Loose wires, rugs, and other tripping hazards should be cleared away to prevent falls, even if they seem obvious and easy to avoid. Remember that people will be walking through this area carrying heavy objects and not paying as much attention to where they place their feet.

Approach any stacks of furniture or other items and give them a gentle push or shake. If they wobble or lean in a way that makes you uncomfortable, it’s probably better to take them down. During the move, someone may bump into them while focusing on what they are carrying, so it’s better to be safe than sorry.

4) Plan out the new office space

Planning where you want everything to go in your new office space will make the delivery portion of the move smoother than if you have to decide where each item goes on the fly.

Like with the file inventory, go through the office and make a list of types of furniture you have and how many you have of each. This list will be used to help you plan out the new office’s layout, so don’t include any furniture pieces you plan to dispose of during the moving process. If your layout is segmented into discrete sections you plan to recreate in the new space; then it’s probably best to organize your furniture list according to each.

Depending on how much time you have or how compact your new office space will be, it may be worthwhile to record the measurements of each piece along with the type and quantity. If you don’t have the time or don’t anticipate much difficulty making everything fit, then recording some rough estimates of each item’s size should suffice.

If possible, go to the new office space with some relevant team members and at least one person from the moving crew to plan out the new office layout. Consult the furniture inventory you created earlier to ensure each item is accounted for in the new space.

5) Plan out the move itself

Now that you have the old space prepared and the new space planned out work with your moving team to plan out the step-by-step process by which the move will proceed. Considering the available walkways, labour and moving tools available, the planned layout of the new space, and any other relevant details, decide which items from which sections should be moved first.

Ultimately, there are far too many specific and circumstantial factors for any sweeping generalizations, but here are a few guidelines to consider, in rough order of importance:

Start near the door: all else being equal, it’s best to start from the section closest to the office’s exit and work back toward the outer walls. Moving the items near the back before those in the front will mean maneuvering around them to get to the door.
Start with the section which will be furthest from the door in the new space: a smooth delivery from your current office to the new area involves both an efficient packing up of the items and an efficient deposition into the new space. Applying the same principle above, consider which items will be the least in the way once you start filling your destination.
Larger items go first: by moving the largest items in a section first, you free up space quickly and make packing the moving truck easier and more efficient. As space in the truck is filled, the remaining space available becomes increasingly awkward and unforgiving. Ending with the smallest items makes it easier to fill those unusual spaces, saving you time and decision-making energy and keeping each load more compact and efficient.
Keep wait and fragility in mind: while it is good to start with the larger items, sometimes the smaller items are denser and thus heavier when occupying the same space (e.g. heavy boxes of paper files). Packing many heavy, if compact, items on top of a large piece of furniture which was not designed to hold that much weight can result in serious damage.

When estimating how long the moving process will take, unfortunately, it’s best to be pessimistic. You should hope for the best, of course, and plan to make it happen, but you should also be prepared if things take longer than expected. Like with any other multifaceted process involving many people and steps, there will inevitably be complications and delays.

Depending on how much time you have, estimate the amount of time that each step in the moving process should take, including the drive from one office to the other. Identify chokepoints which could slow things down, like elevators or stairwells, and plan for possible hold-ups or delays.

If at all possible, spread out the parts of the process that won’t disrupt workflow across multiple days. For example, if you have access to the new space before the moving date, you’ll save yourself stress and time by having some smaller items move earlier.

While detailed planning can help you anticipate and plan for potential problems, no plan is perfect, and it’s best to assume that something will come up you hadn’t prepared for. Once you have a combined estimate of how long the process should take from start to finish, add another 20% to that time. This will give you a margin to account for complications and problems that you couldn’t see coming.

What if you didn’t have to move your files?

If your office has a large volume of paper files, you can save yourself a lot of work and worry by getting them digitized before the move. In fact, the lead-up to a move is the perfect time to enhance your information management with digitization, since you’ll have to pack all those files up either way. Digitizing means that you won’t have to unpack them at the new location, however, saving half of the work of moving your files. Plus, once your information is digital, you’ll never have to move it again, making any future office moves simpler and easier.

Digitizing your files also gives you the option to spread the process out before the move, making the day of the move less stressful. This is especially helpful if you don’t have access to the new office space until the day of the move, as it gives you a way to clear out some of your cargo ahead of time.

Any time you digitize, you’ll need to create a list of all your files to verify later with the service provider, the same kind of list you would have to make before a move to verify that nothing went missing.

The point is, moving your paper files is a significant portion of the work of an office move. Digitizing them instead takes significantly less work, can be done gradually ahead of time, and only needs to be done once, preparing you for any future moves as well.

Get in contact with us today to find out how digitization can help make your office move simpler and easier, and ensure that your organization is more flexible and resilient on the other side.

December 9, 2022

Information Management: Why it Matters

Information management is the process of using technology to store, organize, protect, and utilize information. It can be used in many different contexts, such as businesses, educational institutions, and healthcare. In a business context, Information Management helps organizations better track their data, control it more effectively, and use it to make more informed decisions. By implementing an effective information management system, businesses can increase their efficiency and effectiveness, better control their data and information security, create stronger relationships with partners, and access valuable insights into the marketplace.

The Benefits of Good Information Management

1: Efficiency

The primary benefits of good information management start with organizational efficiency. A well-implemented Information Management system will help an organization to quickly locate and retrieve data or documents when needed, which in turn helps to streamline processes and increase productivity. An effective system will also provide better control over their information, enabling organizations to securely store and access it when necessary, while preventing unauthorized users from accessing the data.

And, of course, greater business effectiveness means better profits. That doesn’t always mean reduced costs, however. Improving your information management system may require some increased spending to modernize your information infrastructure, hire consultants, or dedicate valuable executive time to re-evaluating and innovating your practices and policies. But with streamlined information processes, better control over your information, and fewer bureaucratic inefficiencies, you’ll be refining your operation (saving on future costs) and increasing revenue through better marketing and more effective business relationships.

2: Control & Security

Another major benefit of good information management is better control over your information. As with anything else, control requires awareness. Not only will an effective system provide quick access to data and documents when needed, but it will also keep better track of incoming information, as well as the information you’ve already got.

Information you don’t realize you have, sitting unnoticed in some hard drive or filing cabinet, could possess a potential value that you’re not leveraging. At the very least, even if it’s not very valuable, it would be better to know you have it than to let it take up space unaccounted for.

Even worse is information you think you have but don’t. Without comprehensive inventories and metadata of all of your information storage, you might falsely assume you have access to an important file that was actually lost or never even acquired in the first place. The false belief that you have all the information you’re supposed to can prevent you from seeking it out and acquiring it, possibly even long enough that it becomes impossible

It can also help organizations prevent unauthorized users from accessing their information, while still providing access to those who need it. This helps organizations keep their data secure, while still streamlining processes and making sure that their valuable resources are well utilized. Two of the primary goals of good information management are information security and organized and efficient storage. These are often summarized under the virtue of “Custodianship.” Good custodianship of information is good control over it. Without good custodianship, information won’t always go where it’s supposed to, leaving segments of your organization without the information they need, and possibly even leaking sensitive information out into the wider world.

3: Acquiring Valuable Intel

Good Information Management can also help an organization become more effective by making it easier for them to make decisions based on accurate and up-to-date information. This will allow them to access insights into customer behaviour, market trends, or other important data that can be used to inform their decision-making. Without effective policies regarding the acquisition and organized storage of information, these kinds of insights may stay out of your organization’s reach or may be impossible to leverage due to disorganized storage.

4: Better Business Relationships

Furthermore, an effective Information Management system makes your organization a more valuable business partner. An organized system is attractive to potential partners, who may be uncertain of your organization’s ability to manage the data they share effectively. This can also help an organization by providing them with access to information regarding non-competitive organizations in a particular industry. Having up-to-date and comprehensive intelligence on competitors, potential customers, and other market players helps you stay competitive, and choose equally competitive partners.

Conclusion: Better Information Management = Digital Information Management

The advantages of digital technology in information management speak for themselves. Digital technology allows for faster, more accurate search capabilities and storage methods that are both secure and organized. It also provides easier access to valuable data and insights from partners, customers, and competitors. An effective Information Management system is essential for any organization looking to remain competitive in the 21st-century business landscape.

Digitization services are the best way to bring the information from your paper files into the digital world, letting you get the most value out of your information, while also giving you the control and security needed to stay competitive. By leveraging digital solutions, your organization can easily realize the benefits of good information management: greater efficiency, better effectiveness, more control over their data, enhanced security, and better relationships with partners. With the right Information Management solution in place, your business will be well-prepared to navigate the digital age.

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