By Lawrence Wischerth, Records Information Manager at Healthfirst
December 10, 2010 - 3:16 PM
It’s hard enough to believe in Santa Claus these days, especially with the potential risk of secret, confidential diplomatic dispatches about Santa and his North Pole operation being exposed by a certain infamous Wiki……. (just kidding) So, in keeping with the Holiday season, I started to look for evidence that not only does Santa exist but that he must have an ECM and workflow system installed at Ye Old North Pole workshop. I admit that my inspiration for this blog post was a November 23, 2010 KnowledgeTree blog post titled “8 Reasons why Santa Claus Needs Cloud-Based Document Management System” that I found on John Mancini’s Digital Landfill feed. So my acknowledgement and thanks goes out to KnowledgeTree for the inspiration.
Now that that is out of the way, let’s look at the evidence.
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Santa receives millions and millions of letters each year at the North Pole. How could he possibly read and process each letter or Christmas list without the use of high speed document capture and OCR technology. I suspect that Santa has implemented a digital mailroom application to address this business challenge.
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Once the letters and lists are scanned and indexed, they must be reviewed against Santa’s database of “naughty or “nice” children. The review is a required workflow step to insure that the appropriate gift and response is sent to each child. This would not be possible without the correct Taxonomy, Information Governance and Classification tools.
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Santa relies on information about each child from previous year’s letters to see where they fall along the “Naughty or “Nice” continuum. Final decisions about the number of toys delivered or amount of coal each child receives is based on this assessment. Timely creation and management of electronic reports is critical to this step in the process.
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A Records Management module must be part of Santa’s ECM system to help him manage the retention and destruction of so many letters and lists. To remain compliant with the regulators and to reduce risk, Santa applies a 6 year retention period to his letters and transactional data. This enables him to keep data for as long as it is relevant to his business while allowing his systems to operate efficiently.
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How could Santa’s Workshop keep up with the volume and variety of requests from “good little girls and boys” without a well-developed and efficient workflow system? When you consider the short timeframe from request to fulfillment, doesn’t it stand to reason that Santa uses a workflow to manage his business process so that everything is ready for the “big night”? Talk about “Just in Time” inventory management!!!!!
Well you should be convinced by now or at least be leaning in that direction. If you are still not sure, try to imagine how Santa could possibly get everything done without the benefits of ECM. Let’s face it, he runs a pretty efficient shop up there at the North Pole.
Finally, I heard from a reliable source that Santa is considering a plan to allow children to communicate their requests to him next year using Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other social networking outlets. Mrs. Claus told me in confidence that this request was at the top of Santa’s Christmas list this year. Can you imagine how many “friends” Santa will have on his Facebook Page??
My best wishes to everyone for a wonderful Holiday season and a Happy, Peaceful and Prosperous New Year.
Note: Healthfirst employment is listed for identification purposes only. Opinions expressed are personal opinions and not those of my employer
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