Happy New Year! Here’s hoping the New Year brings a lot of peace, happiness and prosperity to all of us!

As we move ahead with the New Year, I wanted to share my views on what I think are some of the information management challenges that business will face in 2013…

Going Greener!

Over the past few years an increasing number of companies have been doing their bit to make their operations more environment friendly.  Adopting document management software helps towards this by drastically reducing the need to print or photocopy documents. Every document an employee needs can be made available to them in digital form on any device.

Most companies adopt document management by starting with one or two departments. A popular department to start with is the Accounts department. This is because storage and processing of invoices via document management software has quick and clear benefits.

But document management can make teams more efficient in any department. For e.g. Legal teams can handle creation, review, approval and renewals of agreements and other documents. A large part of the hiring process can be streamlined by using document management in the HR department.

So one challenge for companies is to get more out of their investment in document management software by spreading its use to other departments. Not only will they get more bang for the buck but they will also significantly reduce the use of paper within the organization.

Harder to protect information

2012 was the year of the tablet PC.  Amazon, Google and Microsoft all had interesting launches this year in addition to Apple and Samsung.  Businesses must now deal with another device from which information will be accessed.  Another device which can be lost or stolen easily just like the smartphones.

Businesses need to work harder to deal with such eventualities.  It is not difficult to block access to a device once it is reported lost or stolen. But only having a product with a strong audit trail will tell you what was viewed, modified or deleted till the time access was blocked.

The growing trend of BYOD (Bring You Own Device) adds even more complexity. An employee could simply fail to report loss of a personal device. So only a strong audit trail can allow you to take stock of the amount of unauthorized access.

Uniform information access methods

The days of the business user largely using Windows based desktop and notebook PCs is well and truly behind us.  Today it would not be uncommon for the user to have a Windows Desktop machine, an Apple MacBook, an iPad tablet and an Android smartphone. The challenge is to make information accessible from all such devices with equal ease without adding IT management or training burden.  This means having a uniform method of information access across devices. At ITAZ we will be concentrating on this challenge in 2013.

Documents and information in GLOBODOX can already be accessed via our top notch Windows Desktop Client, our web client for Desktop based web browsers and our lite web client designed to work on mobile web browsers.  Our plan is to hugely enhance all three to make them even faster and easier to work with.  We want each client to be similar but we want each to exploit the strength of the device being used.

We will keep you informed as we make progress with this in the coming months!