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Businesses world over are undergoing a digital transformation and organizations are investing in tools, technology and processes to go paperless by converting their documents to digital formats. These documents may be forms, invoices, letters books, journals, photos, maps, manuscripts, office records or other printed materials.
Apart from being eco-friendly, the benefits of going digital are many, ranging from instant access, distribution and longevity to reduced cost of storage and more. As the world goes digital, let us look at some of the key document management trends that are shaping in the future:
With cloud storage being around for quite some years now, the initial hesitation has given way to adoption. The ease of accessibility and scalability has fueled the adoption of cloud storage for document management. Cloud storage ensures availability of documents on the go – without the need of being within a closed network.
Digital record managers are integrating social media technology into document management, making collaboration, storage, organization, and revision of the files a seamless task. Integration with social media also has the advantage of sharing documents in varied formats across various platforms for a wide range of audience.
With artificial intelligence gaining popularity, document management will witness new search capabilities in the coming year. AI will make search simpler with the right keywords and voice search, allowing professionals to focus on their work rather than spending time searching for the documents that they need.
Robotic process automation is gradually gaining popularity to avoid mundane tasks and focus on tasks that create value. In the coming years, software “robots” will automate labor-intensive repetitive activities that are prone to errors. RPA will see more adoption for document sorting, classification, automating routine operations, and integrating unstructured data like emails, forms, photos, and files.
With the changing structure of the workplace environment, as more employees are working remotely, accessibility of documents from a wide variety of devices has become a necessity. As the world becomes a global village, workers need to be able to access the documents from devices including smartphones and tablets and work on them efficiently.
As mobile usage continues to grow, document accessibility is not the only requirement for the professionals who are always on-the-go, document management software also needs to be user-friendly to provide a seamless experience.
As geographical boundaries deem to exist, professionals are no longer dependent on face-to-face interaction. While working on emails already exists, it can be cumbersome and confusing. Collaboration and project management tools has been around and it is now becoming a part of mainstream platforms, which will make document management easier.
Coming years will see document managers collaborating online within a single social space in real-time which will make working on and managing multiple projects faster irrespective of the geographical location of the professionals.
Scalability is a necessary criterion to keep up with the growing volume of documents. Modern Document Management Solutions will not only have the capability to let employees collaborate and edit on a single platform but will also enable the clients to scale up with the growing number of users, storage requirement, multiple locations or the volume of documents. Cloud based solutions will have an edge as they’d be able to offer pay-per-user or pay-as-per-storage pricing models.
Cloud computing, collaboration, and the proliferation of mobile devices are making lives easier for document management professionals. Coming years will continue to see the growth and mass adoption of technology giving birth to integrated, user-friendly solutions, blurring the physical space issues.
MediaGuru is a Global Services Company offering end-to-end solutions in the area of content digitization and preservation, turnkey technology projects and digital media from our offices in UAE, Singapore, South Africa and India.