Let’s be honest. There’s a power struggle between “business as usual” and the undeniable force that is digitization. It’s a pervading pressure happening all around us.
Even though our personal worlds have been somewhat overtaken by digital processes, evaluating and reconfiguring well-established business processes and procedures is a massive undertaking.
While digital transformation can seem overwhelming, doing nothing is no longer an option.
Data and information management is the foundation from which digital transformation is made possible.
We all know today’s consumer isn’t exactly the most patient and we have technology to thank for that. Businesses, who want to continue to successfully exist, have no choice but to digitally upgrade their operational processes.
Digital transformation encompasses just about any initiative to use technology to improve business processes and activities to better meet the needs of today’s consumers and the bottom line.
Not every industry has the same consumer needs so digital transformation means different things to different organizations. A financial institution using machine learning to detect and predict fraudulent transactions? Digital transformation. An e-commerce retailer searching for new and innovative ways to serve personalized recommendations to customers? Digital transformation.
By 2022, IDC predicts 70% of all organizations will accelerate digital technologies to transform existing business processes that drive customer engagement, employee productivity and business resiliency.
In this 2020 report, IDC’s group vice president Rick Villars commented on digital transformation and how the pandemic forced businesses to swiftly accelerate changes. “The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted that the ability to rapidly adapt and respond to unplanned/unforeseen business disruptions will be a clearer determiner of success in our increasingly digitalized economy. A large percentage of a future enterprise’s revenue depends upon the responsiveness, scalability, and resiliency of its infrastructure, applications, and data sources.”
So with digital transformation serving different purposes for different organizations, we believe every good baseline digital initiative starts with modernizing data and information management systems. Otherwise, how can you effectively digitally transform high-value, customer-centric operations when your basic, everyday workflows are still reliant on manual, paper-based processes?
To help you develop a strategy to modernize your data and information management processes and procedures, a solid digital transformation guide is key. From small-things you can get started now to those initiatives that may require cross-functional support and executive buy-in, we’ve put together a comprehensive guide on how to get started with your digital transformation. By the end, we will have provided you with an idea of where your resources, in both staff and budget, should be allocated.
Feel free to jump around from step to step in whatever order works best for your organization. Our goal with this guide is to help lay the foundation for your digital transformation.
Read along, download it for later, or jump to the section most relevant to you.
PART ONE: RETHINK YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH PAPER
PART TWO: AUTOMATION
PART THREE: MODERNIZE THE WAY YOU MANAGE DIGITALLY-BORN DATA
PART FOUR: CHOOSE THE RIGHT STORAGE
PART FIVE: PROTECT YOUR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Today, most business records are “born digital.” While there will always be instances where using or storing paper is required for legal business purposes, you should do your best to seek balance between your physical and digital files. Not only will it aid in your digital transformation efforts, but it will also mitigate the below drawbacks that can occur with an overdependence on paper:
When it comes to the cost of paper, most do not think about it beyond the price of a few reams. However, research shows all associated paper costs (storage, copying, printing, etc.) could reach as much as 31 times the initial purchase cost. By that measure, a $5 ream of paper could in actuality cost close to $1551.
Hackers may steal the spotlight but the majority of information loss is due to breakdowns in processes and procedures, such as employees losing sensitive files2. Considering the average large organization misplacing a single physical file every 12 seconds, it’s not hard to see how easy it is for things to go wrong.
Across the pond, there is the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Violations are punished by legal action and penalties of up to £20 million or 4% of global turnover-whichever is higher-per infraction - which could be as minor as an employee losing a single piece of paper with personal information.
While the EU enjoys a federal level of data protection, the same cannot be said for the United States. Unfortunately, there are many state-level laws but we are one of the few countries without a universal data privacy law. There are rumors of Congress passing a federal data privacy law some time in 2021.
Paper dependency and, by extension, manual processes means more time physically performing various administrative tasks and less time spent focusing on strategic, high-value initiatives.
As more and more of your business is conducted digitally as years go by, the continued use of paper creates a hybrid physical/digital information landscape. It’s difficult to manage. It duplicates efforts. It increases risks to your business and its bottom line.
Understand what you own
At the onset of any type of digital transformation, you must have a complete understanding of all the records and information you possess. This can be achieved by conducting a thorough information audit.
Yes, you will have to comb through every last filing cabinet and storage closet you can find. An overwhelming and exhausting task for sure but a necessary one that will literally pay off.
After conducting this audit, your team will then be ready to enable your digital transformation which far exceeds the initial paper sorting time investment.
► Inventory Audit (Datasheet)
If you don't need it, destroy it
Don’t be that business that keeps everything “just in case.” While the notion of keeping everything may be tempting, it’s also potentially damaging and here’s why:
► Onsite Shredding vs. Offsite Shredding
► Smarter Retention and Safer Shredding: Keys to Better Information Management
Digitize your business processes
When it comes to digitizing paper and its processes, your team has a few options. Here, we’ve outlined each paper converting process with their respective benefits and drawbacks:
Remember, those integral paper records that remain fundamental to your business operations can be converted into digital formats. Originals can be either stored or destroyed, depending on your needs and obligations.
Here are just a few benefits of digitizing:
► Getting It Right From The Start: The Basics of Digitizing
► Digital Transformation and Information Lifecycle Management: Partners in Success
Store what you have left
Is the paperless office ever going to be a possibility? While it’s a nice notion, one-hundred-percent removal of physical documents is far from feasible. Consider these stats4:
Changing the way businesses produce, access and store information is a large undertaking. For decades, paper has been the way to go for all operational processes. It’s possible to shift mindsets as we progress further into the digital age but, even after destroying and digitizing, you’ll be left with more than your fair share of physical documents. How you store those documents depends largely on your digital transformation goals.
Here are the two storage options for remaining paper records:
In addition to quicker access, there are other benefits to offsite storage not directly related to digital transformation, including improving security and compliance as well as increasing protection from both man-made and natural disasters.
Consider the value of metadata
Metadata is descriptive information about your company data. It tells what the content is and the characteristics it possesses and consists of key identifiers, such as Record Owner, Document Type, Dates, Legal Holds and associated values (e.g., John Doe, project plan).
When it comes to efficiently locating records, data and information, establishing ownership, applying legal holds and identifying retention fulfilled records, metadata is indispensable. It’s also critically important in legal, audit, compliance and regulatory activities because it demonstrates the authenticity and reliability of the requested information.
Metadata is increasingly becoming a key component of data analytics and digital transformation success. Without metadata to provide context to information (including its authenticity and level of business value), organizations will store records just for storages’ sake - increasing operational confusion and overall workplace efficiencies.
How to Develop Your Metadata Standard
Since the development and approval of a metadata standard is a collaborative exercise, it’s important to establish a set of universally agreed upon rules applicable to all records. Depending on your organization, developing metadata standards requires input from IT, Legal, Compliance, Enterprise Data Management or Data Governance, Privacy, Information Security, Audit and Records and Information Management (RIM) and others. To enable consistency, any alternate naming schemes that already exist across departments should shift to a singular method.
By using metadata, you can identify additional markers to supplement baseline standards for different business units, record types, location, security, retention periods (more on that in the next section and more. However, keep in mind that an overly subdivided system can undermine the goal of developing a system for locating and retrieving records easier.
Here, we’ve included a baseline metadata chart:
The benefits of metadata standard implementation
Overcome human error
Entering multiple metadata elements is a burdensome process for most employees. Because of this, there is often inadequate or inaccurate record information. To help alleviate this, capturing metadata at every stage of the information lifecycle is recommended.
Here are a few other ways we recommend lessening the metadata standard building process:
Create and enforce metadata policies
We understand just how difficult it can be to put new processes in place, especially when it’s something that touches nearly all operational processes, for large amounts of people to follow.
Here are our best practices we recommend when creating your metadata standard:
► Metadata Standard Best Practices (Infographic)
► Metadata: The Missing Link (Article)
► The Five Fundamental Metadata Requirements Every Organization Should Have (Article)
Here's How to Avoid Repeating the Past
Five, ten, fifteen years from now, do you really want to find yourself in a similar position? Stuck in an unmanageable hybrid digital/physical state without a complete grasp on what records you possess? We didn’t think so. After you’ve finished your thorough records audit along with the removal and digitizing of legacy paper records, the last thing you need is to repeat the process.
To help avoid going through the arduous process of digitization from ground zero down the road, having a Records Retention Schedule is a must. It’s a policy document that defines an organization’s legal, operational and compliance recordkeeping requirements. This schedule is there to help guide employees on how long to keep records for legal and operational purposes and when it’s okay to securely dispose of obsolete ones.
Here are a few more benefits of having a Records Retention Schedule:
How you execute a Records Retention Schedule is a matter of choice. Here are a few options:
What works for your organization depends entirely on your needs and to what degree you wish to include automation as part of your digital transformation efforts.
To be clear, a Records Retention Schedule is not, in the strictest sense, necessary for digital transformation. It’s intended use is to ensure your digital transformation journey remains on track and compliant-both now and in the future. Consider it a long-term digitization management blueprint.
Now that your digitizing is complete, it’s possible to automate those manual, paper-based processes that once took a large part of your employees’ valuable time. This is especially relevant to the parts of the business that must manage a large number of records, such as Human Resources, Accounts Payable and Receivable and Contract Management.
To illustrate the benefits of automation as it relates to digital transformation, we’ll use Human Resources as our core example.
Automate your workflows
Records in Human Resources can easily accumulate as the department touches almost every part of the business. Here’s where we’ve outlined the most egregious areas:
Even with the removal and digitization of paper, it’s still time-consuming and difficult to ensure all newly digital records (sometimes hundreds per employee) are stored and accounted for as well as routed to and seen by the appropriate stakeholders. Any delays in these processes or missing documents should be noticed right away and rectified.
These same problems can extend from HR to virtually every other department. How often have financial closures been delayed? Or deals with vendors bogged down by unnecessary red tape?
From department to department, breakdowns in the management of records and information forces employees to waste time chasing down solutions to otherwise avoidable problems. It’s unnecessary and runs counter to the goal of becoming faster, more efficient and adaptable to today’s digital age.
IDC shows us that automating workflows can lead to a more than 30% reduction in errors and 25-30% increase in productivity, depending on the specific functional area and process5.
Now that we’ve covered how you manage physical records through digitization, it’s time to focus on digitally-born data.
Though it is easier to handle than paper, the reality is not all data can-and should be-treated equally. The way you choose to store data has a profound impact on your company’s digital transformation success.
Do you really need a data
lifecycle management strategy?
Yes, the answer is yes. Without a solid data lifecycle management strategy in place, all of the work your team has done to convert physical records over to digital will be worthless.
A data lifecycle management strategy is about creating and executing a plan to protect, preserve and manage digital data at each stage of its lifecycle, from creation through destruction as informed by a Records Retention Schedule. This includes making strategic storage decisions to fuel digital transformation.
Establishing your data lifecycle management strategy is no small feat. Combing through your data inventory to tag and classify it all requires significant investment and can be enough to dissuade many from fully pursuing digital transformation. But it’s precisely this type of leg work that makes the difference when it comes to meeting the needs of today’s consumers and regulators.
Why a data lifecycle management strategy?
New data is constantly being created in multiple formats and added alongside older data. Extracting valuable insights from it-a key component of digital transformation-depends on having easy and reliable access.
At the same time, the value of data changes as more information is added into your work environment. Your enterprise doesn’t need all of its data all the time, but a lawsuit, audit, request to “be forgotten” or other sudden event can make quick retrieval a necessity.
For digital transformation to work, you must find the most efficient way to classify, manage and store different data types. For more immediately needed data, you might consider onsite or cloud storage; whereas older, keep-it-just-in-case data can be stored in less-expensive, tape archives. There’s no right answer because it all depends on your organization’s needs and budget. The key is to develop a strategy to optimize your data in order to best fuel your digital transformation goals.
The benefits of a data lifecycle management strategy
Now that we have a better understanding of data lifecycle management strategies, you’ll of course want to know how it benefits your business. In addition to being able to easily extract valuable insights, here are a few other benefits:
Bonus added benefits unrelated to digital transformation but nevertheless valuable to your organization include:
How do you formulate a date lifecycle management plan?
Each organization will embrace digital transformation at its own pace so not every data lifecycle management plan will be the same. Having said that, we’ve put together some basic general guiding questions to help get your team on the right track.
Fully assess your business and data management challenges to help address fundamental questions that relate to your digital transformation challenges:
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it gives you a sense of the strategy building process. Depending on the size of your organization, you may be able to answer these questions yourself, or you may need to seek outside help.
Executing a data lifecycle management strategy
Once you’ve set your goals and built the framework of a data lifecycle management strategy, the next step is to implement that strategy.
Here is an example of what your plan could look like:
Stage One: Store active data locally and on a network server while also backing it up to local storage appliances or cloud storage.
Stage Two: As data ages, move it from primary storage into less costly off-site tape vaults or cloud.
Stage Three: Retain your older, inactive data in case of a legal, regulatory or audit event in off-site tape archives that offers high security, quick access and lower storage costs.
Stage Four: Adhere to federal, state and industry regulations for destruction.
► Affordable, Secure, Multi-Tiered Data Storage (Infographic)
► Building a Data Lifecycle Management Strategy in the Era of Digital Transformation (Whitepaper)Regaining access to data from obsolete or unused storage mediums.
Chances are your team has been storing data for years-if not decades-across different systems and technologies. If you have old data stashed on 3.5-inch floppy disks, you probably won’t be able to get to that information without specialized equipment to retrofit modern machines.
There’s also the possibility all your information is contained in electronic formats but stored in systems spread across the enterprise with some saved on local servers, backed up to the cloud, and/or archived in offsite tape vaults, etc.
For a data lifecycle management strategy to be both holistic and effective, your organization’s IT staff must prioritize the restoration and migration of that data away from disparate and legacy formats (e.g., floppy disks) towards more readily accessible modern storage media. Why? Remember complete digital transformation-especially those initiatives predicated upon advanced data analytics-depends on getting the most out of all your data.
Quite simply, getting the most out of your information via digital maturity is impossible if you have unknown data stored on outmoded equipment.
Throughout this process, keep in mind that data retrieval requests can overwhelm many IT departments. Large-scale data migration and retrieval processes require considerable resources and pulling IT staff away from their routine activities could invite unintended risks. Overworked and understaffed IT departments are often cited as a factor7 in companies falling victim to vicious cyber attacks.
To Outsource or Not To In-House? That is the question.
Restoring data from legacy systems and migrating them to more accessible storage options is a massive request for any IT department. It’s also one of the most crucial parts to digital transformation.
Of all the steps towards digital transformation we’ve mentioned thus far, digital restoration and migration, this definitely warrants consideration for outsourcing the most. The benefits of outsourcing are not limited to only faster and safer data restoration.
Because you’re outsourcing with a third-party data management provider, you’ll never have to worry about future technology obsoleting today’s storage mediums. Any provider worth its salt will always keep your data easily and readily available on whatever platform the future may hold.
A quick note on compliance and changing regulations
We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention one of the biggest and stress-relieving benefits to digitizing records - compliance.
Industry and legislative regulations are constantly changing, with many enacting stricter rules on how businesses manage data. Organized, accessible data makes compliance easier to achieve, which can prove significant when facing the possibility of millions of dollars in fines.
Modern data storage compliance is arguably more important to the long-term vitality of your business than it is for any digital transformation initiative and thus worth mentioning.
► Eyes to the Future with Respect to the Past (Best Practices)
► Data Migration Best Practices: Get the Format Right (Article)
You can’t make good business decisions if you don’t know what information you have.
Data lifecycle management strategies give you a firmer understanding over what information your business owns and where it’s located. By having a management system in place, one that includes data restoration and migration, it will be easier for your team to extract insights, a key to digital transformation.
Option(s) For Your Organization
After you’ve completed your data lifecycle management strategy, it’s time to discover what storage options work best for your company.
Since every company is different, we’ve put together a list of pros and cons for each of the various storage options.
KEEPING YOUR DATA IN
(COLLOCATED) DATA CENTERS
KEEPING YOUR DATA
IN THE CLOUD
KEEPING YOUR DATA
IN “OLDER” STORAGE
Investment
Completing steps one through four may put your office in a state of minor upheaval for a while and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Investing time into a digital office transformation is akin to spring cleaning but with a far greater payoff. You’ve inventoried your entire backlog of paper records, digitizing, destroying and storing where necessary. You’ve automated key workflows. You've created a data lifecycle management strategy and stored your data in a way that’s not just cost-effective but ideal for any data-led initiatives you wish to pursue.
To get faster, leaner and more agile to better meet your organization’s goals, you may decide to upgrade your technology with new laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc.
There’s also the chance you may come across boxes and boxes of unused and outdated IT equipment lying around. Either way, you’re undertaking such massive changes and there’s no reason to let that old technology continue to pile up. Make sure you’re securely disposing- if your assets still have value-in a secure, compliant and eco-friendly way.
Let your digital transformation efforts transform your workplace too.
There’s no escaping it. Every organization in every public and private industry is affected by digital transformation.
Research firm McKinsey & Co. says as a result of the COVID-19 crisis most organizations have accelerated their digitization of business processes. This has occurred in at least some business areas to protect employees and serve customer-facing mobility restrictions. Data shows we have leaped five years forward in consumer and business digital adoption in the span of about eight weeks. Organizations had to reinvent their business processes to expedite decision making, reduce fraud issues and more. As a result, they turned to modern data and information management - the foundation from which all these digital transformation efforts are made possible.
We hope this guide sets you on the right path for your digital transformation. To help get you started on your journey or simply for expert guidance, Iron Mountain is here to help. Contact us, today.
1 'Enterprise Excellence through Information Governance and Digital Transformation', IDC, August 2017
2 ‘The 3 E’s of Office Paper Reduction’, Carleton College, https://apps.carleton.edu/…/Office_Paper_Reduction__factsheet.pdf
3 'SaaS Data Loss: The Problem You Didn’t Know You Had'
4 'Five Proven Ways to Maximize Your Resources With Records Management Efficiencies', Iron Mountain
5 'The Paper Lite Office', Iron Mountain
6 'Market Note: IDC Review of Iron Mountain Workflow Automation Powered by Hyland', IDC
7 'Availability Gap Inhibits Digital Transformation and Costs Enterprises $21.8M Each Year', Veam