Annemarie Mannion, Special to the Tribune.
Chicago Tribune. Chicago, Ill
Jan 19, 2004
Once ballyhooed as the promise of the future, the idea of a paperless office must seem like a quaint but woefully out-of-date notion to many businesses and organizations.
Just ask Richard Schepler, controller at Elmhurst College, a small, private college in Elmhurst.
Schepler decides the fate of reams of paperwork the college no longer needs or wants to maintain, a task that has become increasingly difficult under stricter privacy laws and growing worries about identity theft.
At Elmhurst, for example, documents containing exam questions or expired applications containing Social Security numbers have a perceived or actual value. Others, if kept for longer than is necessary, would simply occupy space that the college does not have.
"If we kept everything, we'd have to buy a huge warehouse," Schepler said.
So Elmhurst College brings a truck outfitted with a massive shredder--one that can destroy up to 1,200 pounds of paper an hour-- to campus every few months. It pays Melrose Park-based American Mobile Shredding $65 an hour to load, shred and destroy its excess papers.
Paper shredding is a small-business industry that is growing fast because Elmhurst's needs are not unique. In fact, more companies than ever are under pressure to have systems in place for how documents are managed.
Robert Johnson, executive director of the 375-member National Association for Information Destruction in Phoenix, said new laws and a sense of responsibility dictate that companies and institutions cannot just toss out old papers anymore.
"Frankly, it shouldn't be the janitor that's deciding what should go into the wastepaper basket and then out the door," said Johnson. "It's a decision that should be made at a high level."
Johnson said most of the mature shredding companies that are members of the association have seen 15 percent to 20 percent yearly growth during the past couple of years. And more companies are getting into the business.
When the association started 10 years ago, it had only six members.
The organization now is putting together a national study to measure the industry as it grows.
Regulations issued in 2003 associated with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which dictates how hospitals, insurance companies and medical providers protect peoples' medical records, helped fuel recent growth.
The Accountability Act and the Economic Espionage Acts of 1996 and the 1999 Gramm-Leach Bliley Act, which has requirements for how banks and financial institutions protect peoples' financial information, helped create early demand for the service, Johnson said.
But new laws alone do not increase the need for shredding. The biggest driver is--in spite of computers--the ever-growing amount of paperwork we produce.
"We [as a society] are creating as much or more paper than ever," said Larry Bates. "People will deal with electronic documents, but they still want to get their hands on a piece of paper."
Bates is president of Larry Bates & Associates, which consults with businesses on record and information management. He is also president of the Chicago chapter of the Association of Records Managers and Administrators in Prospect Heights. The group has 10,000 members nationwide and 280 in the Chicago area.
There are other reasons why the paperless office has not emerged as once predicted, said Bates.
"Information has just exploded," he said. "And there are more and more regulations from state and federal agencies that dictate what companies have to keep."
Everyday documents
Even documents that are the product of everyday business may have more importance than may be imagined.
Johnson said a scribbled Post-it note from a company's chief financial officer might contain information that would come into play if a business became involved in litigation.
And seemingly innocuous paper that is discarded every day by a company tells a story.
"The trash that goes out in the Dumpsters tells me what the organization is doing today," said Johnson.
And once a document--be it a Post-it note, an invoice, a coupon or a report--lands in a Dumpster, it is free for the taking, according to Johnson.
"If you discard something, it's public property. There's no law against taking something out of a Dumpster," Johnson said.
That is why companies such as American Mobile sell not only shredding but also assurance that documents are destroyed.
"Everything is cut into quarter-inch strips [and mixed with other media]. There's no way it can be pieced back together," said Joe Cesarini, president of the company.
One of the goals of Elmhurst College is to protect the private information of students and employees.
Other businesses may have that objective and want to be sure that their competition does not get its hands on anything that would give them an edge.
"You don't want competitors to have access to information that could do damage to your company," said Joe Eaton, sales manager for Accurate Document Destruction in Elk Grove Village.
Pulverized products
In addition to shredding paper, Eaton said, his company also can pulverize other materials, such as compact discs or sample products. The paper documents that both Eaton's and Cesarini's companies destroy are recycled.
Like Johnson and Bates, Eaton said it is important for companies of all sizes to have a system in place for how documents are maintained and/or destroyed.
Bates said companies that have an appropriate file system and a schedule of retention and destruction may be in better position to prevail if a lawsuit is filed against them. And, he said, it is important to follow that schedule consistently.
"If you're going to be wrong, at least be consistently wrong," said Bates.
Even if the motivation for getting rid of a document was simply because an employee got an itch to clean, it may look suspicious if it was not the company's usual practice or was done at a time that was out of sync with a regular schedule.
"The plaintiff is going to say, `Oh, why did you destroy that information that's damning to you if you haven't been doing it previously?'" Bates said.
Records management also needs to be meshed with the use of computers and e-mail, he said.
"In this day and age, you need to be sure that all e-mails and electronic media are disposed of at the proper time and in a proper way," he said.
Bates said organizations that need to get a better grip on their file retention and destruction should contact the state and federal agencies that govern them.
"Unfortunately, it's difficult to just go to one book and say, `Okay. Here's all I need to know about retention,'" said Bates.
Businesses also can look for help from associations that represent their specific industries or to an association that deals with the topic of document management.
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