Every journey needs a starting point. And when it comes to Digital Transformation that first step is Digitisation. Get this step right and it will lay a solid foundation for everything that follows.
The best way to start Digitisation is by looking at how your organisation uses paper and determine what is ‘good paper’ – productive, effectively used to drive business processes, and what is ‘bad paper’ – slowing down business-critical processes and delaying decision making.
“Paper is a good place to start thinking about digital transformation, because it is the Achilles heel of most organisations. Paper clogs up processes. Paper creates disruptions to smooth information flows. Digital processes require digital information.” - John Mancini, President, CEO and Chief Evangelist, Association for Information and Image Management
Paper is at the centre of every business process. And while it plays an important role in any organisation’s information flow, its sheer quantity and unwieldiness can also hinder the efficiency of employees and business processes causing disruptions at multiple levels.
And of course wasting paper like this has a huge environmental impact. For example, did you know that over 1 trillion sheets of paper are trashed by offices worldwide every year? That’s equal to a stack of paper 133,000 kilometres high. Or to put it even more dramatically – a column that literally reaches halfway to the moon!
Clearly this kind of wastage is simply neither sustainable nor justifiable and it behooves us all – corporations and individuals – to do something about it.
The good news is, tracking how your organisation uses and misuses paper will not only significantly help you cut down on wastage, it also provides you with an excellent starting point for the first step on your Digitisation journey.