The end of print → sign → scan

A thread on the AIIM LinkedIn group (Join us!) is discussing paper and why we’re all continuing to produce so much of it. There are comments about the advantages of paper and how tablets are now matching more and more of them, including portability, readability, and universal access.

But a top requirement for producing paper has not been discussed: signatures.

In 2013, half of the people responding to an AIIM survey (infographic, survey), agreed that 50% of the time, they only printed business process documents to sign them. Plus, documents that are printed to be signed are often copied, creating more paper and more paper to be handled, filed, etc.

As Douglas Adams described in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, paper documents can easily get lost:

[The documents were] signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again….

These days, the signed documents are usually scanned and then uploaded to a DM/ECM system, emailed, faxed, couriered or all of the above.

But the costs, time, and waste don’t stop there: What should we do with the signed originals? If they were important enough to sign, are they important enough to be saved? Often the answer is yes. For those cases, the originals need to be indexed, filed, and, occasionally, sometimes, retrieved. Since storage is not a one-time cost, the expense continues to mount, year after year, until the files can be deaccessioned, to use the technical term. Then you get to pay the shredder people since we don’t want important signed documents to be discovered by dumpster divers.

Nip it in the bud

We want to stop the print → sign → scan cycle at the beginning. Or as Tony Soprano would say, let’s “nip it in the bud.”

Digital signatures to the rescue: only digital signatures eliminate the paper while providing full legal assurance and independently verifiable documents. Digitally signed documents, like signed paper documents, do not require a specific third party company to verify the veracity of a signature.

With digital signatures, the online document is the original.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to all! In 2014, I look forward to more posts including discussions about SharePoint and digital signatures. You can see all my posts for AIIM by searching for “kluger” on the website.

I'll sign off now. But please use the comments to let me know your digital signature-related questions and comments.

Image credit: Luke Hayfield Photography