Ae you ready? -

Here we are, Florida in August, headed to the height of hurricane season. This time of year always makes me think about being ready for the possibility that nature might decide to wreak havoc. It is also the time of year when I ask businesses about their disaster readiness plan. Of course you should not wait until a season draws near, you should always be ready with a disaster recovery and business continuity plan. This is not just for your digitally created materials but also your paper based information. How would you recover that? One answer is to convert it using scanners to capture that paper based information and transform it into a digital format that can then be saved and managed properly. When you do this, and now control digitally, you have a better chance of recovering it and getting your business back online should chaos strike.

In my view, businesses who are taking the proactive approach in capturing and converting their paper based information to a digital form are in better position to address disaster than those who are not. Think about what has happened in the past, your past, with natural disasters like hurricanes, floods and wild fires or even man made like fire and flooding due to human error or intent. How would you recover from a fire that wipes out not only the building but all of your paper based client files where in a digital environment, you would have a back-up copy somewhere safe and off premise that you can access and restore. The best way to address disaster is to prevent it but in the case chaos does strike, you can plan and prepare for it.

If as an organization, you are ready to move forward and are finding yourself stuck or unfocused and are not sure where to begin or what to do next, seek professional assistance and/or training to get you started.

What say you? Do you have a story to tell? What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you have a topic of interest you would like discussed in this forum? Let me know.

I will be teaching the AIIM Capture program on August 23-24 in Silver Spring, MD and I will be speaking at the following events:

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West Coast Earthquakes

Submitted by Shadrach White August 08, 2011 - 10:15 AM

Out in Washington, Oregon and California we are mostly concerned with the Cascadia and San Andreas Fault lines. Seismology experts agree that these fault lines will cause massive earthquakes, volcano eruptions and tsunami activity.

http://www.nwcn.com/news/quake/Nisqually-earthquake-10-years-later-116626903.html

In February 2001, the Nisqually earthquake rocked Western Washington. I was at Costco’s corporate headquarters for a project meeting to discuss upgrades to the enterprise wide document imaging system. Costco had implemented the solutions early in the 1990’s primarily to increase efficiencies, take advantage of early pay discounts and increase audit capabilities in Accounts Payable. When the quake hit it was so violent that everyone held on to one another in order to prevent falling down. Costco had minimal impacts to operations in AP and did not report any loss of data or documents.

Starbucks on the other hand was located in a downtown neighborhood known as SODO, or South of the Dome (King Dome, which is now gone). The corporate headquarters building was older but had been retrofitted with earthquake proofing construction. No matter the quake shook that building like a rag doll and the entire façade of the building collapsed. Inside the water pipes in the ‘paper’ records vault burst and water soaked the documents. Starbucks reportedly spent big bucks on ‘freeze drying’ processes to save or restore the documents but never fully recovered everything.

The Washington Secretary of State had similar issues in its Corporations division when water pipes burst in the basement where records on all State Corporate filings were stored. Interestingly enough they had already begun the process o f implementing a document imaging and workflow management solution but alas the paper back file conversion process would take years to complete.

Nice Post Bob, brought back some cool stories.

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Good point

Submitted by Bob Larrivee August 08, 2011 - 4:11 PM

Many thanks for the feedback. You are right in that based on where you are in the world, the type of disaster will vary. As I was headed to the Washington DC area today, the news was presenting a story about a quake and Tsunami in China.

It is time for businesses to tighten their control over information and converting paper through scanning is a great start. From there, look at the possibility that anything going forward that is born digital, stay digital.

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Great object lessons

Submitted by Steve Weissman July 11, 2012 - 9:59 AM

Really breathes life into the issue; thanks to you both for bringing it to the fore!

Does make me wonder, though: why do so many organizations store their records at the lowest point possible, where _any_ water that escapes is guaranteed to pool?

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