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By contrast, these days outsourced DM has evolved considerably, and is now way more flexible and sophisticated in the way it is able to help you better handle data. In particular, cloud means we can handle much larger volumes, meaning outsourcing of company information can happen a much greater scale, with far more functional and flexible and tailorable service level agreement options. Forget that CD - now, staff can access the corporate memory banks from the other side of the world in an instant from their smartphone.

This is all great and makes outsourcing far more of an attractive option. However, the reality is that even now, outsourcing of DM is not for everyone, or always the right move in every business circumstance.

Let's review how and why. On the plus side, outsourcing this part of your core business process is convenient and can be bought as a turn-key solution: all the software and hardware are in the cloud ready to run, so all your documents get swiftly indexed, stored and administered by a dedicated team specially trained up for the task. In theory, this should allow your document management infrastructure to be up and running far faster than on-premise solutions, which need to be selected, spec-ed, piloted, deployed, tested, then, of course, maintained. And Internet connection allowing, your team have instant access to all their content and documents anywhere and everywhere, as stated.

You can also realise great economies of scale: your files can be scanned en masse, using high volume, specialist kit provided by your new outsourcing service provider. This is an important advantage, because otherwise you will have to accommodate big capital and staff training costs. What's more, you can take care of all those storerooms and filings cabinets full of paper that clutter up the office and cost valuable desk space.

So if the outsourcer is very selective about what content is stored for real-time or near real-time access, then this arrangement should be a lot more cost effective for you, saving you thousands in service costs versus keeping redundant or archivable content in an easily accessible state. Indeed, our experience shows you should only need to keep 1-5% of all that filing cabinet information following such a project, which is good news.

OUT OF SIGHT ADMIN
Another feature of a good outsourcing partnership is that a lot of the system admin workload you previously shouldered disappears. That's truly the best part of any cloud deployment: IT upgrades and back-ups take place invisibly, plus hardware updates and systems technical administration are constantly and competently managed by staff whose sole focus is the system.

Again, the pluses are adding up here: the chances of 'unplanned outages' - crashes, downtime and lack of system availability - are drastically minimised with a good cloud infrastructure. Never forget that the reputation of an outsourcer is made or ruined on the basis of whether its business continuity works - and if it delivers on its commitment to keeping businesses up and running.

A final point: it's also in the outsourcer's interest to find ways to improve the way you work together; it will want to look for ways to deliver information faster and more safely and offer increased business continuity. So these all look like great reasons to outsource your document management requirements.

BE SURE YOUR PARTNER CAN DELIVER
On the other side of the debate, however, let's consider if there's a need for caution here. For some organisations the cloud is not possible for compliance or policy reasons, such as government mandates that say that data can't be held outside of such and such an area and so on. These affect strategic/political, national utilities, defence and healthcare entities and for good reason - such restrictions are all ones that we would sign up to in order to protect critical national infrastructure and citizen safety.

It's also worth noting that you have to be prepared to go though that rationalising process we mentioned - and if you don't you may be fooling yourself. You can't outsource that problem to a third party as they can't do it on your behalf - they don't know enough about your business, or have access to what your internal priorities are, what is sensitive, what needs to be kept for the regulator.

The moral of the story is that you have to have your content well-ordered and clean - or be prepared to make it so in order for outsourcing to be a realistic option. But that doesn't always happen in the real world, and can lead to issues and in the worst case, the breakdown of a customer-outsourcer relationship completely.

Next, your procure-to-pay cycle or order to cash processes may well link to both central and local business apps. That means you need to share the documents that sit behind both ends of that process, or things may get confusing. The reality is that you're probably going to have a lot more 'hybrid' business process deployments as a result, with some elements outsourced, some kept in-house and so on. This is a more complex set-up and requires careful management and the right measures need to be put in place to make things run smoothly.

Finally while an outsourcer offers some economies of scale nonetheless it's worth noting that not all of them are necessarily well-established, properly resourced, genuinely global players. You need to run due diligence here with any potential supplier, and pay close attention to whether they can process the 'n million documents overnight' advertised.

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