PURPOSE – Have you asked yourself what the business reason is for scanning documents?  The digitisation process inherently means that you are changing your business process.  Some companies benefit from reduced storage and retrieval costs for archived documents, for others, the reasonsing is reduced service times.  Be sure to think the reasoning through.  Someimtes removing paper from the business process is detrimental to your business.

ACCESS – How do you intend to access your digitised documents?  Sure you can burn everything to DVD, but what happens when you wish to add content, particularly if you have multiple office locations?  A network drive may answer this, but have you considered the file/folder structure and file naming conventions?  Perhaps you require a custom application, perhaps even hosted.  Or maybe you will utilise a specialised Enterprise Content Management (eg. SharePoint) or Electronic Document Records Management System for this purpose.

DOCUMENT CLASSIFICATIONS – Have you considered the logitistics of scanning mass quantities of documents?  Barcode separation is a common technique to separate different documents and document classes within a batch.  Each Document Classification will generally have its own unique set of Indexing (or Metadata) capture requirements.  This is critical to enable users to find the document, and also to ensure the document is meaningful before you view it.

FORMAT – The scanning indutry format is multi-image TIFF.  Most image viewers on the market are designed for this.  Detouring away from this has costs and benefits.  For example, should you elect to scan as PDF, you are likely to forgo any annotation features that may otherwise be found in TIFF viewers (unless your company is willing to make costly investments in Adobe products)

Of course there are many more considerations that need to be made.  All it takes is spending a bit of time and thinking through the process.

About the Author

Clayton Dorrington is a specialist in Enterprise Content Management and Document Imaging and Capture for SharePoint.  Clayton specialises in delivering KnowledgeLake Document Imaging and Capture for SharePoint in Australia.  He has experience reviewing the digitisation needs of clients and translating that into Business Processes that deliver real results to clients.  Visit www.clayko.com.au or www.knowledgelake.com.au for more details.