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Weighing the Disadvantages of Digitization

Weighing the Disadvantages of Digitization

Document digitization, as most business managers know, has quantifiable ROI measured in dollar figures with many zeros. One example: A small community college invested in digitization to help process their thousands of paper admissions applications each year, as well as thousands of operational documents of every kind. To learn if their investment was paying off, they applied the four digitization ROI factors from Forrester Research’s digitization analysis:

  1. Benefits– What are the tangible and intangible benefits to an organization, in dollar terms?
  2. Costs– How will the organization pay for digitization, both in hard costs and in resources, and are there finance or tax aspects of the cost that can be beneficial?
  3. Risks– How do uncertainties – usage, growth, obsolescence, etc. – affect the total impact of digitization on the organization?
  4. Flexibility– How does digitization create future expansion opportunities for the organization?

When the community college calculated these factors, they found they had received an immediate ROI of $150,000 in the first semester of using an electronic content management (ECM) system. Your results may vary, possibly even better.

Digitization has numerous advantages:

  • Centralized information source
  • Simplified file sharing for collaboration
  • Faster information search and retrieval
  • Reduced loss and security risks
  • Reduced storage space real estate costs

All these advantages add to the cumulative ROI of digitization. But are there any disadvantages? The answer is “Possibly,” if you:

  • Invest in digitization technology that is not robust, from an inexperienced or unreliable vendor.
  • Ignore the organization-wide need for digital security, not just for your Electronic Content Management (ECM) digitization system, but for all your connected e-devices.
  • Overlook the cost of the learning curve when introducing new technology in-house, rather than outsourcing the steepest part of that curve to an expert service provider.

We’ve never seen an ROI analysis of less-than-optimal ECM investments. Why would anyone want to start from a point of disadvantage? Contact an digitization expert and optimize the digitization advantages, and the ROI.

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