By Jesse Wood, eFileCabinet
Have you ever witnessed a data breach of customer information and wondered, how did this happen and how can companies like mine avoid these mistakes in the future? If you’re like most retailers, the answer is a resounding “yes.”
These questions have become so prevalent in retail organizations that headlines now pose them not only to retailers under fire, but also to consumers, who today — as never before — question whether retailers can be trusted with their personal information. This is becoming especially true given the proliferation of online retail transactions.
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This occurs for two reasons: either retail businesses are paper-dependent, or the retailer uses arbitrary storing and classifying of digital information — making it easy to lose or misplace customer information.
Looking at the course of information management’s evolution over the past 20 years, retailers now predominantly store information digitally, yet un-securely, while using paper documents, too.
These mediums exist in most retailers today, increasing file duplication, re-creation, and file retrieval difficulty. Couple this with the fact that 90% of the world’s data was created within the last two years, and the result is unchecked chaos, making information and process transparency a pipe dream without the right technology in place.
But there is a larger issue: 61% of data breaches involve paper documentation, fraud is on the rise, and the “fast food” mentality of managing digital information, which has made us too “complacent” with our technology, continues facilitating breaches and consumer fear in the online retail space.
We’ve reached a divergent road for information management, which splits at the solutions retailers use to solve problems that paper and unchecked digitization have caused. Both online retailers and brick-and-mortar vendors alike will lose or win business because of this phenomenon alone.
A document management system (DMS) is a contender for solving this issue: its audit trail features would render any omissions on the retailer’s end too egregious for auditors to miss, possibly saving consumers from scandal or, at the very least, revealing auditor’s culpability.
Additionally, functioning as a central repository for all workflow and document usage and editing, DMS traces exactly who knows what, making e-discovery and prosecution processes far simpler and perhaps entire incidents preventable.
Without mass adoption of DMS across online retailers and brick-and-mortar stores alike, data breaches and lax security on paper-dependent processes may persist. Although some documents must be kept in paper format for compliance and consumer-accessibility purposes, there are very few retailers that couldn’t go 98% paperless and still be 100% compliant.
But DMS systems have outgrown the very name of their solutions, proving they are capable of much more than mere management of documents: reducing the probability of data breaches, tracking employee behavior, securing and simplifying file sharing and dissuading fraudulent activity, to name a few.
DMS has built-in security features to simplify and facilitate compliance, such as audit logs, role-based user permissions to prevent unauthorized users from viewing certain documents and features that trace precisely who’s done what, viewed what, and where it occurs. Under full and proper use of these systems, the likelihood of regulatory investigation and consumer distrust can be significantly decreased.
Not only does DMS simplify auditing, it creates the efficiency retailers need to increase output for customers and better tend to their needs — an imperative given the era in which we live — one where the customer is given a strong, amplifiable voice.
But it’s up to retailers of all varieties to use DMS to their benefit, and ultimately to the benefit of consumers. Consumers await a widespread change that can restore their trust, and retailers can facilitate it through document management systems.
To facilitate this paradigm shift, retailers must rely on new technologies to bridge corporate, consumer and regulatory interests. Otherwise, as data and information continue to proliferate at a pace as rapid as it is unchecked, competing interests will interfere with the retail market’s greatest purpose: to enrich, improve and empower the lives of the individuals it serves.
Jesse Wood is the CEO of eFileCabinet, a Lehi, Utah-based document management software company. Founded in 2001, eFileCabinet, Inc. began as a cutting-edge tool to digitally store records in accounting firms. As it grew in popularity, eFileCabinet developed into a full-fledged electronic document management solution designed to help organizations automate redundant processes, ensure security, and solve common office problems.
