Information at your Fingertips

It is human nature to crave instant information so that you may quickly form opinions and make judgments — especially today.  Accustomed to the immediacy of social media, we don’t necessarily like to wait to find out what is going on around us.

Molly Wells, former executive editor at CNET.com, discusses the issue poignantly in an article published four days after the tragedy at the Boston Marathon.  “If speed is the currency of the modern information era,” Wells says, “misinformation is the increasingly high cost.”

Whether you have gotten caught up in developments around recent reports of violence, political conflicts, or the latest news on your favorite celebrity, you know that the information you receive, from social media, a news program, or otherwise, can be biased and inaccurate.  Rarely, if ever, do those articles, news casts, or tweets include every pertinent detail.  But that is the information you have access to, so sometimes we jump to conclusions and spread it as fact.

Now, though, picture this happening in your organization.  What if the information you have — inaccurate, incomplete, outdated, and/or based on assumptions — is the information fueling your business?

Consider loan processing in banks.  As applicants are sending in documents, including: personal information, credit history, and other critical financial information, these documents can easily be misfiled or lost.  And, as these documents are updated over time, it is hard to keep track of the most current version or incomplete documentation.  Whether the end result is a misinformed loan approval or a frustrated customer, there can be real financial consequences and it can be damaging to the bank’s reputation.

How do you ensure the information your employees are using to make critical business decisions is accurate and complete?  You capture the most up-to-date documents and information and make it all instantly accessible in a central secure location.

Here’s how:

• Capture from electronic and physical storage: Scan and import any document type, including: paper documents, PDFs, email correspondences, and even engineering drawings, just to name a few.
• Capture from remote offices: Centralize documents (and information) you receive at remote locations, instantly giving staff at any office access to the information they need.
• Capture while on the go: Using your mobile device, you can take images of documents or complete electronic forms and, from the road, upload them to a central location.
• Capture accurate information directly from your documents: Advanced capture solutions automatically extract information from those business documents, validate it against other systems and databases and then update all your systems instantly.

It’s a scary world out there, an intense amount of inaccurate information quickly being accepted as fact.  You don’t have to be afraid, though.  If speed is the currency of the modern information era, there are tools out there to help you capitalize on that and allow you to turn it into a competitive advantage.

Just remember one word: Capture.