How to turn your paper office into a digital one
1. Any sheet of paper that is classified as of little or moderate importance (business phone bills or travel expenses receipts) is a potential candidate to be digitally archived. You can either destroy such documents or keep them in a store.
2. Get the hardware needed for a digital office. A scanner (or better still a document scanner) will convert your paper documents into digital copies.
3. Develop a "paper to digital" conversion process. Decide policies (filename convention and storage location for example) and make everybody in the company aware of the process so they can follow it.
4. Identify who needs access to digitised documents. Avoid file duplication and data loss by limiting access to the documents to reliable employees trained to follow your data policies.
5. Make locating digital documents quick and easy. Use any of the dozens of 3rd party applications that allow you to search for documents according to author, content, date or file properties.
To learn more about how to turn your paper office into a digital one, why not read our data management guides:
Building a knowledge base
Controlling access to data
Protecting important data
Sharing data
Related Guides
- Assigning data access rights
- Backing up data
- Buying low cost IT equipment for your business
- Choosing an IT consultancy supplier
- Controlling access to data
- Creating a business plan
- Creating better business presentations
- Customer relationship management
- Data protection law
- Disaster recovery and your business IT
- Effective time management
- Email storage
- Environmentally friendly IT and reducing waste in your business
- Getting emergency IT help
- Getting good IT training
- Managing appointments
- Online demonstrations
- Online learning resources
- Online project management
- Online search tools
- Online sharing of documents
- Open source software
- Patents and intellectual property
- Remote broadband access
- Sharing data
- Starting a new business or entering a new market
- Supporting your IT
- Using online postage systems

