New Zealand’s finance organisations are legally required to comply with information management governance practices. This means clear policies surrounding the following:
- Collection of information
- Disclosure of information
- Dealing with requests for information
- Storage, security, retention and disposal of information
While technology is supposed to make life easier across all sectors, the adoption of new technologies often leads to fragmentation in how documents are received and recorded. That’s one of the reasons why this New Zealand information management company sees room for improvement for some businesses within the finance sector, particularly in the area ofdocument management. As far as they’re concerned, these changes need to be made:
- The elimination of inefficient paper-based processes. They can be made more efficient by applying workflow software; the automation of business processes and decision making gives organisations within the finance sector greater control, visibility and consistency of those processes.
- Better capture and management of diverse inbound data. The conversion of files and records to digital images and associated metadata are effective for financial organisations who need to quickly access information from stored documents while reducing the time it takes for staff to manually search and retrieve physical files and documents.
- Improved discovery and access to digital records. Electronically Stored Information (ESI) comes in the form of electronic documents, e-mail, voicemail, instant and text messages, databases, digital images, multimedia files and file metadata. Various eDiscovery applications and technologies make it easier to retrieve information and records from within these massive volumes of content, that would otherwise take hours to trawl through, by extracting the data and making it ‘searchable’.
- Secure information storage. Every organisation within the finance sector stores information, often out of a need to stay compliant and satisfy the legal requirement to store data for a set period of time. However, not every organisation does it efficiently or securely. This means combining traditional vault based storage of physical hard drives with cloud-hosted solutions and disaster recovery for managing back-ups. Access to this backed up data is essential to ensure business continuity.
- Effective destruction of unwanted information. For reasons of compliance and improved data security, document destruction is another area where things can be done better. Onsite secure bins through to bulk destruction of documents and records performed at secure sites are obvious areas to be addressed while investing in a professional e-Waste service means confidential data on decommissioned computers or storage equipment can’t be accessed by the wrong people.
These are all highly effective ways to improve information management within the finance sector. Companies like this one offer those solutions for finance organisations ready to take things to the next level.
