Introduction
Effective business continuity planning requires the timely restoration of critical functions after a disruption to normal business operations. This would include developing plans for recovery of essential IT infrastructure, critical applications, and time sensitive business processes. In the aftermath of emergency situations, however, it is all too common to find that organizations fail to plan adequately to protect and replicate paper records, as necessary to mitigate risk and continue operations.

Not only is paper easily lost, but it is also very fragile and easily destroyed. In case of a flood or a fire, many vital records would be lost. Some records cannot be recreated and by law they have to be retained for a certain period of time. If records are lost, an organization would not be able to present evidence in court or pass its next Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) audit. For example, after the Oklahoma City bombing, about 40,000 records were destroyed, causing the settlement of about 100 cases due to lack of evidence.

Implementation
Implementation of any record management and/or paper digitization solution is a significant undertaking and must be approached with a detailed plan of action and significant buy-in and approval from all stakeholders. Implementation breaks down into 4 distinct phases:

1) Identifying objectives
2) Identifying products that meet those objectives
3) Implementing a system
4) Digitization of records

Identifying Objectives
Identification of mission critical objectives is the most important part of the implementation process; the Business Impact Analysis (BIA) provides the framework for such decision making by identifying all records that support operations and by linking those records to processes. As we examine the time sensitivity of processes and the records that support them, one key decision that must be considered is what records need to be digitized and why. Organizations also must decide what approach they will use to digitize their records. Currently, there are two possible approaches:

1) Backlog conversion
2) Day forward

If an organization chooses to digitize the backlog of paper records, a decision will need to be made as to which records have priority. Most likely, records that have the longest retention schedules and are required to be maintained for audits and to be compliant with laws will have higher priority.

In a day forward approach, the backlog is not digitized and instead all new records are digitized from a certain day forward.

It is very common for organizations to pick a slight mix of both processes. An organization might designate certain backlog records that are vital to business operation and digitize those records, while ignoring other backlog records. All new records will be digitized, as well.

Identifying products that meet those objectives
Once key objectives have been set, a line of products will be evaluated to see what Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) solutions meet the needs of an organization. Common factors are batch digitization, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) capability, search and retrieval of records and, most importantly, the redundancy of the system.

For example, some EDMS solutions are better than others at automatically batch processing large collections of forms with very little user intervention. This greatly speeds up the digitization process of certain forms.

Integration is also a key part of the solution. The product should support open standards in the database and image format. The full scope analysis of different vendors is out of the scope of this article; however, there are many resources online.

Implementing a system
Once vital records have been designated for scanning and an EDMS solution has been identified, the next step is to deploy the system. EDMS systems can greatly enhance the recovery speed of an organization from a disaster. It is very common for

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