Leaders clearly understand that significant business value lies locked away in paper documents, with 89 per cent agreeing that digitising and unlocking data from physical documents would improve business decision-making. Furthermore, 61 per cent of UK business leaders believe that digitising hard copy documents would save between five and 20 per cent of their annual turnover, with 35 per cent able to achieve a five to 10 per cent return and 26 per cent an 11 to 20 per cent saving.
Phil Keoghan, Chief Executive Officer, Ricoh UK, says, “Leaders are aware that the business opportunities of big data go beyond the digital and must address the physical documents that also hold critical business insights. With leaders under pressure to make the right decisions to steer their businesses out of the downturn, we found overwhelming agreement that digitising and unlocking data from physical documents would improve business decision-making. Indeed, business leaders still foresee volumes of hard copy information growing in the workplace. It is clear that we are now in the era of bigger data and our ability to easily access information, whether digital or physical, is essential as organisations accelerate their digital transformation and drive business growth.”
The research reveals that almost half of organisations still have between five and ten years’ worth of information stored only in hard copy. This is not only having an impact on business decision-making but also productivity and the bottom line. The majority of leaders (62 per cent) agree that it takes too long to find the information they need from hard copy files. Data that is fragmented across filing cabinets, warehouses, basements and files held by employees, often comes at a significant price. Rental space is at its highest in London, with annual occupancy costs the most expensive in the world .
While the initial focus of big data initiatives has been on digital data sources, there is growing recognition from business leaders that there is significant value lying dormant in physical information assets. 77 per cent said they could have learnt from the previous recession and reduced the impact of the current one if they had better access to historical data. As a result, over three quarters of respondents have spent more time digitising historical data during the economic downturn. HR, finance and procurement functions continue to rely on paper-based processes in many cases, and often compliance dictates how certain hard copy data, such as medical records, must be retained. However, the digitisation of hard copy documents is now becoming a business priority for organisations. Five out of ten respondents (52 per cent) expect to have completely digitised these assets within the next three years.
David Mills, Chief Operating Officer at Ricoh Europe adds, “The first step to managing bigger data is to eliminate the mystery surrounding it. There is one real outcome that matters. That's collecting, analysing and acting on the high-quality information available, and using it to provide a better service to clients, winning their loyalty and continued custom. Valuable business insight existed long before the big data boom, so it is essential to continue to look beyond digital information. Significant trends and insights from historical data, for example archived in hard copy, can help to tell the full story and are essential for businesses in the future. The economic crisis has underlined the importance to the organisation of gaining a 360-degree view into the environment around them, both in the past and present. It’s therefore vital that businesses harvest all of their critical information to gain competitive edge, and enhance business decision making in the future.”
For more insights into the impacts of technology lead change visit http://www.ricoh.co.uk/thoughtleadership.
About Ricoh
Ricoh Company, Ltd. (Ricoh Company) is a Fortune Global 500 company specialising in technology and services that transform high volume, document intensive business processes into more efficient ones. This is achieved through Ricoh’s expertise in Managed Document Services, Production Printing, Office Solutions and IT Services. By working with Ricoh, businesses can streamline the way they work, become more efficient and profitable, and share knowledge more effectively within their organisations. With a global workforce of 109,014, Ricoh operates in Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific, China and Japan.
For further information, please contact: Laura Williams, Content Marketer at Proof Digital on behalf of Ricoh UK Ltd laura(at)itsproof(dot)co(dot)uk.