• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Housing Technology logo

Housing Technology

Housing | IT | Telecoms | Business | Ecology

  • Free Subscription
  • Search Archive
  • Home
  • Research
  • Magazine
  • Events
  • Recruitment
  • Blog
  • On Demand
  • Contact
Home / Magazine Articles / The ‘less paper’ office, not a paper-less office

The ‘less paper’ office, not a paper-less office

Ian Keers OBE, managing director of Cave Tab explains how housing providers can move towards a ‘less paper’ office.

As the housing sector faces stricter regulatory and legal requirements, coupled with rising tenant expectations and ambitious post-Gershon efficiency targets, managing the exponential volume of paperwork is a major challenge. As a result, many organisations are so busy ensuring that their tenants’ houses are in order that their own can be woefully neglected, giving resulting in inefficiency and unnecessary operational risk.

Keeping records is a fact of life and the housing sector is no exception. Records have to be kept for many reasons and, along with IT systems, form an organisation’s ‘corporate memory’. Badly-kept records that contain vital information but are unavailable to the user render a business vulnerable to legal issues, compliance issues or simply poor decision-making.

On the other hand, good records management supports the fast, accurate filing and retrieval of important information and delivers hard and soft benefits including reduced physical storage requirements, staff productivity gains and reduced risk exposure.

More than simply filing
A record can be defined as an item of information necessary to business operations. It might well be a paper document, but is increasingly likely to be an email, a Word document or a spreadsheet or an image of a document which started out on paper and was subsequently digitised.

‘Records management’ covers the maintenance and control of all information held by a business in whatever form, while ‘filing’ refers to the more prosaic business of storing and indexing paper documents which in this day and age is only half the job.

Out with the old
If your organisation does not have a retention policy and simply stores everything forever, lack of space is likely to be an issue.

Every type of document has a lifespan or retention period and this varies according to statute and local policy. For example, financial records must be kept for seven years and personnel records for ten years after leaving date, etc. If you have not done so already, identify all the types of document in your organisation and apply a retention schedule to them. Once they have reached their retention date, you can destroy them unless you want to keep them for historical reasons.

In addition, it is generally accepted that all records have a lifecycle and that the majority of their activity is in the early stages, followed by a long period of declining or no activity. By identifying what point in this lifecycle a particular record has reached, a more informed decision can be made as to whether it should be stored in your expensive head office, moved to cheaper off-site storage, or digitised and its image put on a server and the original securely destroyed. The correct application of this type of policy will save surprising amounts of valuable office space and therefore cost.

In with the new
While the benefits are significant, with records on paper, on servers, in the office and in off-site storage, a proper records management software system is essential.

Most organisations have people who can knock up an Access database for all kinds of things, so why not this? As a rule of thumb, your records management system should be able to handle the following as a minimum:

Live paper records;
Archived paper records;
Digitised document images;
Retention management – knowing the age of your records and to report on those due for destruction;
Folders in boxes, boxes on shelves, shelf locations in warehouses, etc;
The contents of boxes;
Secure destruction of time-served documents.

Of course, like many things in life, you get what you pay for and a more specialised records management system will also manage the movement of records around the organisation, including:

The precise location of every record in real-time;
The movement history of every record, such as dates, times, locations, and who did what;
Forward requests for records from live or archive storage;
Separate volumes of the same record that may move independently.

A web-based system also provides access to authorised staff, whether they are in the office, on the move or working from home. In addition, the use of barcode and/or new generation RFID technology allows the movement of documents to be captured with little or no human intervention, reducing the risk of human error and giving staff no excuse not to use it.

A ‘less paper’ office
In reality, a truly paperless office is almost impossible to achieve. However, most organisations can achieve a ‘less paper’ office by following these seven steps:

Establish a document retention policy in accordance with statutory and compliance criteria;
Review all records against your new retention schedule;
Destroy records that are outside their retention date;
Move inactive records to cheaper archived storage;
Consider digitising some/all records;
Implement a records management software system to manage everything for you;
House the remaining active paper records in space-efficient storage with high-visibility indexing.

In so doing, organisations in the social housing sector can put their own houses in order, resulting in significantly more efficient, effective and compliant operations.

Ian Keers OBE is managing director of Cave Tab.

See More On:

  • Vendor: Cave Tab
  • Topic: Document Management
  • Publication Date: 013 - January 2010
  • Type: Contributed Articles

Primary Sidebar

Most Recent Articles

  • Free cyber-defence tools from NCSC
  • Learning from history
  • Grand Union Housing gets connected with Aico HomeLink
  • The silences in the system: Predicting and preventing damp and mould
  • Looking back and to the future: Cyberthreats in social housing
  • Hyde signs repairs contract with Totalmobile
  • Fuelling high performance automation
  • Morgan Sindall’s Carbon Zero decarbonisation tool
  • An ethical approach to arrears
  • Housing and the ever-evolving workplace
  • Supporting residents with home safety risks
  • Less innovation & more service design at RHP
  • Ateb Group outsources IT help desks to Central Networks
  • Capital Letters partners with Evo Digital to tackle homelessness
  • Calico appoints M247 for digital transformation
  • 24/7 care requires 24/7 technology
  • Govtech trends for 2023
  • Are you ready for business process automation?
  • Lincoln council moves to the cloud with Civica
  • Why do IT business improvement projects fail?
  • Flagship and Ebrik launch augmented reality app
  • Following the golden thread
  • Setting the standard for carbon-monoxide protection
  • The business case for data
  • Digital twins – When, not if…
  • Using data to build communities
  • The cyber-security jigsaw’s missing piece – Managed detection & response
  • Cyber-security challenges in housing
  • Digitalising retrofits with SHDF & HomeLink
  • Tips for improving care and support

Footer

Housing Technology
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Contact
  • Free Subscription
  • Book an event
  • Blog
  • Search All Articles
  • Research
  • Update Your Subscription
  • Privacy Policy

Welcome to the housing Technology – Trusted Information For Business Professionals in HOusing

Housing Technology is the leading technology information service for the UK housing sector and local governments. We have always believed in the fundamental importance of how the UK’s social housing providers use technology to improve their tenants’ lives.

Subscribe to Housing Technology to gain market-leading research, unsurpassed peer networking opportunities and a greater understanding of your role to transform your business.

Copyright © The Intelligent Business Company 2022 | Terms and Conditions | Privacy Policy
Housing Technology is published by the The Intelligent Business Company. A company with limited liability. Registered in England No. 4958057 | Vat Registion No. 833 0069 55.

Registered Business Address: Hoppingwood Farm, Robin Hood Way, London, SW20 0AB | Telephone: +44 (0) 20 8336 2293

htc23 pop banner