For many business owners, digital backups may sound synonymous with digital preservation. In reality, that could not be further from the truth. Digitization of paper records and a thorough digital archival strategy can not only make your business more efficient and organized, but also provide a historical record to spark innovation and keep you from making the same mistakes. Just because all your records are already digital doesn’t mean they’re safe. There are many dangers to digitizing without a plan while there is much to be gained by investing in proper digitization and archival solutions.
What Do Digitization and Digital Preservation Mean?
Digitization is more than scanning papers and stashing them in a folder on your server. It’s about taking your valuable information and making it an efficient, effective, and workable asset for your business. What’s the point of having everything scanned if someone can’t find what they are looking for?
Through proper digital preservation techniques, your scanned documents can contain metadata tagging, optical character recognition (OCR), and other tools to make your data easily searchable by anyone in your company. Quick search and reliable digital provenance are a boon to all aspects of your business. This includes maintaining brand authenticity, and storytelling to product innovation, and to legal and compliance support.
Reliable digitization strategies also provide a company history you’ll be grateful you have five, ten, or twenty years down the line. Failure to maintain proper digital governance could mean losing whole segments of your business. One gaming company learned this the hard way when all the source code and most of the design documentation for their games disappeared. Help your business grow without losing track of your past.
8 Ways Going Digital Increases Your Business’s Value
1. Digital Backups
While backups aren’t synonymous with preservation, they have a key advantage over paper records. Digital materials can be lost by disaster, misplacement of mobile storage media (i.e., flash drives), cyber attack, or technical malfunction. Off-site or cloud storage of up-to-date digital backups are the best insurance policy against disaster or cyber threats (if proper security measures are in place). Instead of spending weeks or months manually recovering your business (if it can be salvaged at all), digital backups can bring you back to standard operations in a matter of hours.
2. Storage
Scanning paper documents versus traditionally storing in filing cabinets allows you to dramatically reduce the cost of keeping and storing years’ worth of documents. Whether on your own server or on the cloud, you’ll be able to store more data for a fraction of the cost.
3. Efficiency and Organization
With proper metadata or full-text search you can effectively organize your scanned and born-digital data for quick and easy retrieval. Sensitive data can be encrypted or isolated using granular permission controls. Employees can access cloud-based information remotely, giving you and your business more flexibility without interrupting someone else’s workflow to retrieve the documents they need.
4. Historical Records
If your company is small or just starting up, keeping a record for posterity probably doesn’t seem like a high priority, but that’s the best time to initiate good digital governance and preservation. When you’re celebrating your twenty-fifth anniversary, the complete record of what you’ve done and how you’ve grown will be ready to send you into the next twenty-five years with a clear understanding of who you are as a company.
5. Corporate Governance and Legal
Recording history isn’t the only reason to keep documents for twenty-five years. Legal documents are often necessary years or decades after they were first drafted. The last thing you want is to be searching for a paper or digital document needed in litigation and come up empty-handed. Paper documents can be lost or misplaced, and the same is true for digital documents if strong hierarchy and search data aren’t put in place at the onset of digitization.
6. Innovation
What better way to improve your business than by knowing what worked and what didn’t? You may want to discard a failure as the wrong path taken. However, having a strong digital record of both your successes and your failures can help you analyze right from wrong. Therefore, you can strategize how to improve innovation on your next project.
7. Continued Access
Obsolescence is a major danger to companies who digitize their materials and then let them sit on the server for years. Technology is changing rapidly. File formats and storage media from ten years ago are already inaccessible to modern computers (zip disks, for example). Archival methodology ensures your data remains accessible ten, twenty, or fifty years into the future. Proper digital preservation saves digital files in archival formats meant to remain applicable according to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for decades to come. For some file types, there may be no standard, but digital preservation means identifying file formats about to become unreadable and updating to current or new archival formats so your data is always readily there when you need it.
8. Monetization
Depending on your business, monetization of digital documents may become viable in the future. Many magazines, like Vanity Fair and TIME, are now putting up digital collections of their history for customers to buy or subscribe to for access. Yours may be a young company now, but does it offer something that people might want to look back on a decade from now?
Scanning your documents and engaging a thorough digital preservation plan can improve your business’s value now and in the future. Don’t be left searching the cabinets for something that could be a click away.
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