Unstructured Information In The Modern Office

What is ‘Unstructured Information’ (UI)?

Unstructured information (UI) is any record, file or document not in a database, or some kind of system.

It is all the boxes of paper records from the last 30, 40, or 50 years.  It is of all the digital files on shared drives since 1995.  Its never been filtered and each year it just grows.  Today, digital UI is the fastest growing data segment.  It’s also a target for cyber-crime and bad actors.  Opening any unstructured file attached to an email is the most common path to data breach.  Simply put, UI is a security risk.  it’s also a productivity drain and it’s costing organizations plenty in productivity and turnover.

People Naturally Want to be Productive

There used to be a time (think pre 1990) when filing was a strict process.  The structured style of filing from ‘days of yore’ was replaced in 1995 with ad-hoc filing on desktop PC’s.  People began to casually name a file, but someone couldn’t find it 5-years later because their perspective is different.  This causes people to be less productive and less satisfied at work.  Each year a younger generation enters the workforce and struggles with a condition created years before their time.  FreeDoc ® can fix this.

FreeDoc ® has developed a process to correct UI, to empower your people and protect your enterprise.

The FreeDoc ® Process – Structuring Workplace UI

FreeDoc ® restructures enterprise UI with a 5-step process * to filter file past disposition and then serialize these into a secure database.  Then you can manage information programmatically, by policy.  Finding the right record can be simple, predictable, and fast.

Benefits

  • Increased employee retention
  • Increased service to the public market
  • Reduced risk to the enterprise as a whole

Employee satisfaction, efficient operations and legal compliance are the natural outcomes and benefits of structured records management.

In this light-hearted presentation given to Seattle ARMA Washington State employers, FreeDoc ® Managing Consultant Peter Frix shows the relevance and benefits from structuring records into a serialized data base.

* IDC (2000); McKinsey (2012).

** Disposition Authority Number (DAN) – Washington State Common Records Retention Schedule (CORE).

 

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The Modern Office

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Changing Workplace Technology – Decentralization

As part of our work, FreeDoc ® has analyzed the record-keeping practices of over seventy major enterprise organizations.  Our experience shows the ‘Modern Office’ is really just a massive hedgerow of shared drives (on-prem, or cloud) filled with unstructured information.  There are very few if any file naming standards, and even fewer processes to weed out old, out dated information past retention.

How this Happened

Before 1990 ‘filing’ of records was done by trained file clerks as a centralized discipline.  The appearance of network PCs erased it overnight and turned it into an individual task done with very little training.  Standardized file naming disappeared overnight.  With every retirement the problem only gets worse.

Loss of standardization makes it difficult for people to find accurate information.  The drag on productivity is substantial.  Research done in 2000* and verified in 2012* showed the average person spends 30% of the paid workday searching information filed by someone else, only to find it doesn’t meet their need.  Or, they just lose time in other ways.

Payroll is the highest expense within an organization.  Reducing this productivity loss by re-assigning even ten-percent can increase huge performance gains, and reduce turnover!

Benefits of Standardization

  • Increased employee satisfaction and tenure
  • Increased service to the public market
  • Increased security to the enterprise

In this light-hearted presentation given to Seattle ARMA Washington State employers, FreeDoc ® Managing Consultant Peter Frix shows the relevance and benefits from structuring records into a serialized data base.

* IDC (2000); McKinsey (2012).

** Disposition Authority Number (DAN) – Washington State Common Records Retention Schedule (CORE).

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