takeITon.

Only 13 per cent of businesses in the East of England consider themselves to be shining examples of a paperless office according to new research commissioned for takeITon awareness week (24 – 28 November 2008).

The research, commissioned on behalf of the East of England Development Agency’s (EEDA) takeITon campaign, found that over a quarter (28 per cent) of businesses in the region have not moved into the digital age and still keep either all or most of their important information on paper, posing a potential threat to business operations.

Nearly 40 per cent of people have lost important business information at work, and workers are much more likely to lose paper-held data than data which is stored electronically. There is of course no back up or storage system that can recover lost paper data.

The impact of lost data is a very real problem to businesses:
• The average worker in the region spends nearly seven days per year searching for lost data at work
• 77 per cent of workers admitted that lost information has slowed them down in their job reducing their efficiencies..

Jan Pinkerton, head of business ICT and intelligence at EEDA said:

“It is worrying the number of businesses in the East of England that are still relying on paper. The takeITon campaign is raising awareness of the benefits of businesses switching to a digital office, such as the increased efficiencies which can have a massive effect particularly on smaller businesses that are already feeling the pinch of the credit crunch.”

To help businesses transform their office from paper to digital, EEDA’s takeITon campaign has produced a series of ‘top tips’:

takeITon: top-tips for turning your paper office into a digital one
Any sheet of paper that is classified as of little or moderate importance (business phone bills or travel expenses receipts) is a potential candidate to be digitally archived. You can either destroy such documents or keep them in a store.
Get the hardware needed for a digital office
A scanner (or better still a document scanner) will convert your paper documents into digital copies.
Develop a "paper to digital" conversion process
Decide policies (filename convention and storage location for example) and make everybody in the company aware of the process so they can follow it.
Identify who needs access to digitised documents
Avoid file duplication and data loss by limiting access to the documents to reliable employees trained to follow your data policies.
Make locating digital documents quick and easy
Use any of the dozens of 3rd party applications that allow you to search for documents according to author, content, date or file properties.