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As we near summer 2020, remote work is looking more and more like the new norm for millions of Americans who previously went into a workplace every day. As these employees have probably already noted, working from home or otherwise remotely comes with a host of benefits: no more time or money wasted commuting, no more cash spent on lunches out, no more missing the kids' bedtimes because of late nights at the office.
Digital Document and Data Management Is the Way Forward
Despite the hardships they present for many, the stay-home mandates still in effect throughout much of the country are also acting as springboards for the realization by leadership at organizations everywhere that modern, streamlined digital document and data management has to be the way forward.
"With the proliferation of incoming information from multiple channels, it is imperative for organizations to invest in capabilities to capture information at the source, digitize it as soon as it enters the organization and transform that information into actionable business processes," David Roe writes in a recent piece for CMSWire.
The secure digitization of a company's information is paramount to its continued success, particularly in times of global uncertainty. Here, we lay out the three characteristics of a sound digital document management system that best enables remote work.
Weightlessness
One of the soonest realized upsides of digitizing volumes of paper data is the weight it quite literally lifts from the shoulders of team members. In shelter-in-place situations such as the one necessitated by COVID-19, no longer will employees have to heft weighty cardboard file boxes home from a central office or worry about getting them shipped to colleagues or transported back when restrictions lift.
No longer will these same employees need to scour anywhere from dozens (best-case scenario) to thousands of paper documents searching for specific pieces of information, wasting hours of company time in the process. Once digitized with Canopy, Ripcord's proprietary software, an employee can call up any information stored in their organization's digitized files with just a sub-second search, saving significant time and money (and potential sciatica).
Portability
Another plus of digitization is its ability to move with you. No matter where a company's employees are in the world, as long as they're Wi-Fi-connected and have been granted user access to Canopy, they can get to, edit, rearrange, index, and share organization content from any device. Even these days, as we remain home as much as possible, the portability of a sleek, agile, digital data management system such as Canopy can be an enormous help to the workflow.
With many states' schools closed through the end of the academic year and summer camps for 2020 a big question mark, remote-working parents are looking at many more months at home every weekday with their kids. Being able to take work documents from device to device, room to room, and even inside to outside so that child care and work can be juggled is a boon that would be virtually impossible with paper documents.
Security
Whether scanned in by our AI robots or born digital from the start, documents and other content hosted in Canopy are stored securely in each entity's own, private, cloud-based instant, making it all far safer than if it were on paper or stored in another outmoded storage system. Information kept in Canopy's ultra-secure center is encrypted, rendering it unreadable by potential hackers, and its administrator controls allow account owners to make employee access granularly tailorable and even limitable.
More than likely, a significant number of those who went remote when COVID-19 hit in the U.S. will continue working from home even after the pandemic has passed. This will mean, among other things, that a company's information no longer stays within its central office walls. Rather, it will be at the homes and/or coworking spaces of its scattered workforce. If that information remains on paper, it is subject (and potentially available) to the external forces exerted upon that environment: children and other family members, fellow coworkers, pets, and more. Going paperless and moving everything to the cloud circumvents these risks entirely.
About Ripcord
Ripcord is on a mission: to digitize the world. Our proprietary cloud software, Canopy, enables the instantaneous categorization, indexing, search, and retrieval of every part of an organization's scanned documentation. Ripcord saves companies time and money and frees up human employees for more of the work they truly enjoy.
Pull the Ripcord and unleash the power of your data today.
