Gardner on Going Paperless

Documents, Liberty and the Pursuit of Paperless

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It was American Ben Franklin who is credited for first calling out the relationship between Liberty and Security, and his sentiments apply as much to business documents as they do to our society.

The challenge for business is that our businesses benefit from open and easy access to information, but we have a responsibility to our customers to ensure that we take appropriate measures to protect their personal information.  It is this balance between the efficiencies companies can gain by openly sharing information with all employees (liberty) and the obligation to protect information (security) that is a major short coming of paper based agreement processes.

Take for example the simple situation of an application process that requires credit card information to pass from the applicant to the company.  It is likely that the individual’s application contains a lot of information that must be shared with a variety of people within the organization.

This may include the sales representative who solicited the application in the first place, the customer service agent who is confirming that the application has been received and the application adjudicator who is going to process and approve the individual’s request.

To make this process run efficiently for the applicant the company is best to make the application widely available so any of their employees can quickly and easily put their fingers on the document.  The problem of course is that in order to allow efficient access to the application, the company has to compromise the security of the credit card number.  Even though it is likely only one person (the person processing the payment) in the organization actually needs access to the credit card information, everyone who can access the document compromises the company’s consumer obligation to protect their sensitive personal information.

This of course isn’t limited to Credit Card information.  Internal comments, patient history, sexual history or orientation and a limitless number of other bits of information are equally as important to the consumer as their credit card information.  Protecting all of this information is critical and providing the liberty to access the document is essential.

This is exactly where enterprise class Paperless Agreement Management platforms shine.  These platforms can protect and control access to individual components of information within a document, without having to deny access to the entire thing.  Liberty and Security, another reason why paper’s time has come to end for business.