The ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ mantra gained a lot of currency in the 1980s. Since then a large number of organizations have been aggressively pursuing 3R policies, from paper usage and disposal practices to energy usage and water consumption. There is one additional area however, that demands equal consideration: managing data and documents.

Companies will often hold information in a variety of different electronic formats and in different physical locations to meet different requirements. In many cases, like with PDF files, those formats consume inordinate amounts of storage space and drive up associated costs.

With industry observers predicting that by 2011 the digital universe will be magnitudes larger than what it was in 2006, the time has come to apply reduce, reuse and recycle thinking to electronic business information. Embracing a more strategic, ‘green’ approach to information management delivers a number of benefits, not the least of which is a dramatic reduction in the cost of document storage. 

Transform and repurpose to reduce
There are a number of specific technology offerings that can help to reduce storage demands and improve real time access to business critical information. These include server-based solutions that reduce storage by de-duplicating redundant print and graphic resources across high volume transactional content, such as customer statements, invoices and personalized direct mail. Others enable the storing and on-demand conversion of smaller print stream formats to much larger sized, more visually appealing formats such as PDF in real time for online presentment (ePresentment).

On-demand conversion of print stream to PDF or Tiff formats eliminates the unnecessary storage of large format documents, and lessens internal network congestion during the retrieval process. For some organizations, this “on-the-fly document and data transformation and repurposing” approach has effectively reduced storage requirements by as much as 90%.

The three Rs in play
Document archival and retrieval solutions enable the principles of reduce, reuse, recycle to be applied to data and document management today. To demonstrate how these solutions work, let’s look at the example of a leading financial services institution that recently upgraded its customer service technology infrastructure to provide its 2.5 million online customers with easy access to mortgage statements and offers.

• Reduce – When the organization moved to personalizing customer statements, the size of each document exploded from one-twentieth of a megabyte to between 5MB and 9MB, for a conventional statement. Monthly archiving would have demanded 12.5 terabytes of storage per month. Instead, the monthly storage footprint was reduced by 97 per cent to 375 gigabytes.
• Reuse – Their customers can now retrieve mortgage information with embedded messages and attached marketing collateral pieces via conventional mail, email, or through a Web portal. Customers also have direct access to historical statements and year-end reports, as well as reprints – all of which can instantly be reassembled on demand.
• Recycle – The mortgage service provider is “recycling” content data to personalize cross-sell offers to the right customer at the right time. Statement data can be analyzed and decisions can be made about the most effective way to market to a particular client.

Given that many large enterprises are spending a significant amount of their IT budgets on their storage infrastructures, there is a bigger push than ever to apply 'reduce, reuse, and recycle' thinking to information management needs.

Start today
Here's how you can start applying the “3 Rs” to your document management practices today:

• Reduce Unnecessary Storage Demands — Store native print streams in your corporate Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution and then transform “on the fly” to readable formats such as PDF for presentation to internal stakeholders or online for customers. This “on-demand document transformation” approach can reduce storage requirements by as much as 90% for highly composed documents.
• Eliminate Duplication — Implement a “Resource Versioning” strategy and eliminate the need to store repetitive content resources such as logos, fonts, overlays or graphics for each document, multiple times, within an ERM (Enterprise Report Management)/ECM system. Common resource elements can be stored once and then assembled on demand when a document is printed or presented electronically resulting in massive storage reduction.
• Rethink the Value of Paper — Think about reducing unnecessary paper waste well before the “blue bin” recycling stage. Organizations can significantly cut the cost of physical print and delivery by implementing contemporary electronic archive solutions that provide real-time information access and multi-channel online delivery (eDelivery) capability to internal stakeholders and customers.

Stuart Butts is a founding member and director of Xenos Group Inc. A successful entrepreneur and creative leader, he has founded a number of leading-edge technology companies in both Canada and the US. He is a graduate of Trent University and the University of Toronto Law School and a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada.

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