3 Business Risks of Bad Document Management
November 14, 2019
It’s just a piece of paper. It costs a little more than a penny. So how can document management ever be a “risk” to your business?
It’s what’s on the paper, it’s content, that poses potential business risks.
Blank piece of paper? Zero risk. Piece of paper with a customer’s personal information on it? Untold risks. They include being in contravention of government policy and/or being liable for financial losses.
Even if you’re well aware of the fact that it’s not the paper, but the content, you still may not be using best document management practices in your company to protect it from the risks of lost data and content.
The Risks of Poor Document Management
The following are just a few of the less common business risks that you can expose your company to through not managing corporate documents properly.
1. Unauthorized Access to Information – Restricting the access of different people in your company to different sorts of information is a smart data security move. But only if its properly enforced. Here’s how quickly and easily it can all fall apart. An authorized person opens a restricted digital file or hard copy. He then leaves his workstation with the document open, or with the hard copy sitting on his desk.
2. Lost Data – Without digitizing paper documents and backing up digital data, the information can be lost at the click of a mouse or by being put through a shredder.
3. Lost Productivity – Very few businesses, if any, fully understand their costs of information retrieval. In the case of paper documents, stacked somewhere in endless records boxes, it can take a significant amount of time to find a document. And similar problems can exist with digital documents.
But that may not be the largest cost of data retrieval. It’s when the person who goes through the arduous process of finding a physical document fails to return it to its proper place that retrieval times can become especially problematic. Imagine how long it takes to find a document that isn’t where it should be.
If you enjoyed this post, check out our recent article about how to prevent identity theft in Canada.
