According to Terry White, a business and technology advisor with Marketworks: "With [approximately] 23 South African laws covering the retention and management of corporate documents, the negative consequences of a paperless office are profound, and it must be said, often little understood by businesses or their IT functions. For instance, the Radicati Group estimates that by 2008, average users will require 16MB of storage per day to store their electronic documents."
The Butler Group saw fit to issue a stern warning in a report entitled Documents and Records Management, published in February 2005, stating that: "An ignorance of obligations under current and pending regulations to retain information will cost organisations dearly as regulators get tougher on companies that fail to discover and retrieve information."
In other words, move to a paperless office, by all means, but realise that storing and retaining that data is obligatory under local regulations.
Says Butler: "Far too much information is retained by organisations; records should be retained that are required to run the business or to meet statutory requirements. Unfortunately, there is often mistrust in the ability of IT to perform adequate and regular backups and, more importantly, in the ability to restore information on demand. Butler Group does not believe that paper-based documents are any more secure than electronic ones. The greatest challenge for organisations, and the one that Butler Group believes poses the highest risk of failure to achieve, is the ability to locate information."
Says White: "Companies are encouraging staff to delete their e-mails to make space available. This is the legal equivalent of shredding documents, which is fine because probably only 2% of documents should be kept. The question is: which 2%? Companies need to have policies in place to cover this element of document management and retention, and, importantly, have to ensure that all staff are fully conversant with the policy.
"What about technological progress?" asks White. "In 15 years` time, will you be able to read the medium that was used to store documents on? Fifteen years ago, we used cassette tapes. Where are these tape readers now? So for every upgrade of technology, companies have to transfer documents from the old technology to the new, and keep doing it for the prescribed period."
Says Marketworks technology and business advisor Pieter van Zyl: "An interesting problem with regard to electronic documents is whether the stored version of a document that has possibly been compressed and gone through some format changes can be regarded as an accurate copy of the original. After all, these documents are actually just a combination of zeros and ones that get translated by an application into something meaningful."
Perhaps the perfect solution lies in the middle road: put a sound policy in place and ensure that records that need to be kept are printed and stored in secure archives, while conducting day-to-day business using as little paper as possible.
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