Paper, Paper Everywhere

I am constantly reminded that I am not the only one who has too much paper.  Talking to a customer today I realized that just as I get frustrated with too much paper and too many files, so do they.

So how can we get rid of the paper.

1)  Get rid of anything that you can get electronically.  Personally these consist of brokerage statements, bank statements, credit card statements, etc..  Professionally these consist of pay stubs, eMails, green bar reports, etc.

2)  What you have to keep look for an imaging solution.

3)  Start imaging everything

4)  Start imaging old paper

For the home you can go as simple as using the scanning software with your printer or as sophisticated as products such as neat receipts and other software.

For the office first you will probably need a higher capacity scanner than your printer.  As for the software, some software allows you to grab printouts before they go to paper and index them.  The key to the profesisonal software is indexing.  You want to be able to search contextually (using keywords).  You also want to be able to comment on the the images if necessary and redact i.e. whiteout key parts of the images you don’t want other to see.

Besides getting things moved to electronic copies, imaging also has the ability to set up workflow between co-workers.  (Imagine anything that needs to be routed around for approval.)

We deal a lot with customer on imaging and what all it is used for is quite amazing.  Many hire temporary help to scan and image old paper online.  Others use conversion services to move from microfilm to electronic images.

So next time you get paper, paper everywhere think about making it electronic.

Is eMail “Old School”?

For the last month I have set the goal to begin to really use the productivity tools that I have been given to see if they actually help or hinder my productivity.  Thus began not only an in-depth examination about Lotus Notes (our personal productivity software of choice), Salesplace (our CRM software of choice), and instant messaging.  But, also how could new social networking technologies such as blogging, Linken In, wikis, twitter etc., help make me productive and help me better communicate with others.  My goal was to increase my productivity and increase customer face time.

So far so good.

Today I read something in one of my favorite Lotus Notes blogs, by IBM’er Ed Brill (www.edbrill.com), that got me thinking – is eMail becoming “old school.”  As one of IBM’s Notes evangelists, Ed was responding to an article in Sunday’s New York Times by another fellow IBM’er, entitled “I Freed Myself from eMail’s Grip.”  This Times article went on to describe how the author was using “collaboration” tools to get things done and minimizing the use of his personal productivity tools (eMail).

I spent a good part of the day today reflecting how one lives without eMail or even minimizes it.  I then realized maybe we have now gone so far to the left using eMail as our main source of communications, that we have forgotten about all the other ways we connect with people.  Prior to eMail the good old telephone is how we communicated.  Prior to social networking sites we had chat rooms.  Now with social networking sites, and collaboration tools like instant messaging we have more choices and newer ways to communicate.

We recently held a seminar for clients and prospects on social networking.  The idea was to educate them on what is out there and how it is being used.  The interaction between attendees was amazing.  My favorite story came from one of our University clients.  The individual attending had been tasked with how to best use blogs, wikis and other social networking tools to communicate between faculty and students at the University.  He went on to describe how an incoming freshman inquired about what tools the college used to communicate.  When she was told eMail, instant messaging, wikis and other collaboration tools were used she stated – “eMail is how old people communicate.”

I have worked with quite a few companies in the last year replacing eMail systems and setting up retention strategies for eMail. Buying not only hardware and software, but services for these projects.

So I ask you is eMail “old school” or is it one of several tools to communicate?