“Of course we have that information. It’s around here somewhere.” Ever heard similar words spoken at your organization? Living in an age where such a significant amount of our information is born digital, it’s easy to assume that the data you need exists somewhere within the company. In all likelihood, it does. But simply having information floating around somewhere in your company’s technological systems doesn’t make that information accessible and useful. If the document is saved to someone’s desktop, or attached to an email that was sent five months ago, it’s hardly of any use to the organization as a whole. This is precisely where information governance (IG) comes into play.
Information governance is a term used frequently in the document management industry, but its definition can be somewhat hard to pin down. According to Gartner, it’s “the specification of decision rights and an accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the valuation, creation, storage, use, archival and deletion of information. It includes the processes, roles, standards and metrics that ensure the effective and efficient use of information in enabling an organization to achieve its goals.”
In essence, information governance is determining the proper way to handle your company’s information so that it can be used effectively.
Utilizing a document capture program is a crucial step in the information governance process. Capture ensures that your documents are converted to readable and searchable digital text. PSIcapture advanced document capture can capture documents that are scanned or those that are already in digital format, ensuring that every document that comes through your organization is able to be found in a digital search.
PSIGEN provides several tools useful for facilitating information governance in your organization. Here are a few:
- Classification: Classification plays a significant role in information governance. According to AIIM’s 2015 Information Governance report, only 21% of surveyed companies said they had successfully automated classification of records. Of those who are using automated classification, 63% cited improved searchability as the biggest benefit when compared with manual classification processes. Automatic classification is clearly beneficial in improving information governance, but not enough companies are taking advantage of this powerful tool. PSIcapture’s Classification module intelligently separates and groups pages based on document type. This takes much of the grunt work out of processing documents. Once Classification has been performed, the documents can be processed through workflows tailored to their specific document type configurations. PSIcapture’s Classification paves the way for maintaining your company’s document retention schedule—an important part of your IG initiative. Once documents are accurately classified, your document management system can deploy the appropriate retention policy, so you don’t have to worry about whether or not documents are being retained for the appropriate amount of time.
- Indexing: Both of PSIGEN’s products, PSIcapture and PSIfusion, provide advanced indexing tools that facilitate the extraction of crucial data from documents. Indexed data can be automatically routed as metadata to your company’s ECM system, allowing for intelligent search of your documents once they are stored in the repository.
- Reporting: An important aspect of Gartner’s definition of information governance is that it is an “accountability framework.” In order for IG to work in your organization, everyone who handles information needs to be accountable for handling it properly. Reporting allows administrators to have full oversight of the PSIGEN workflow process, so there will never be any question as to what happened to a document. Reporting can also assist with version control, as it allows you to determine when a specific document was processed. This way, you have a trail of when the most recent version of a document was processed and can delete any outdated versions to eliminate confusion and miscommunication.
If your organization is behind on information governance, don’t wait any longer to get started. Contact PSIGEN today for details on how advanced document capture can help you get control of your business’s information.
