Recently I stumbled across a live site that shows all the commercial aircrafts in the skies above us at any given moment in time. The sheer volume and what can only be described as complete chaos, had me mesmerised.
However, with over 100,000 daily commercial flights taking off and landing across the globe, the aviation industry is probably one of the most meticulously organised operations that spans across the globe. A lot of it is thanks to the highly integrated, centralised and coordinated air traffic control (ATC) operations which play an essential role.
Now just as each of the 100,000 flight needs to be precisely planned, monitored and organised throughout its journey, the same is true for the thousands of documents flowing through a firm each day.
ILTA 2014 is a 4 day conference event for law firms to get the latest on technologies, best practices in information and organisational management. This year, the event was held in Nashville, USA in late August. Damian Jeal reports on one of the many compelling sessions and compares the different views on electronic document around the world.
In conjunction with the huge volumes of electronic data in existence today, there has been a steep rise in the amount of confidential information being misused, lost or stolen. Organisations must now safeguard their sensitive data to meet the requirements of Australia’s updated Privacy Act, or face the harsher fines that have been defined.
On March 12th 2014, Australia implemented its Privacy Amendment Act 2012. This Act now comprehensively extends the regime around the collection, use, disclosure and transfer of data of a personal and sensitive nature. These amends follow the recent, similar changes to the EU Data Security Directives set out to provide a more harmonised approach to data protection across the EU Nations. Consequently, organisations are required to take “reasonable steps” to protect such information from misuse and loss.
As the world becomes increasingly digital and teams work collaboratively across the globe, managing large amounts of information efficiently has become paramount. Physical ring binders have always been used as a centralised tool to store, organise and transport paper documents in large bundles.
However, electronic documents and increasing workforce mobility are creating new needs which the physical ring binder can no longer satisfy. Firms are seeking digital alternatives that can integrate their modern document workflow and realise the time and cost saving potentials.
Yes, digital binders do exist and with more and more of our clients deploying them, we look at the top 5 practical ways in which firms are actually using them and making a difference.
One in four European companies reported at least one case of information theft in 2013, up from 18% in 2012*. With the huge volumes of digital data now transmitted or stored electronically across the globe, we have seen a proliferation in cybercrime and industrial espionage.
Although EU laws today are meant to protect businesses, they are only effective to a certain degree. This is because there has never been a “one size fits all” approach to privacy compliance. The differences between each country’s set of regulations, make it hard to answer questions such as the level and extent of protection and what needs to be done when data is stolen, especially if your activity spans overs several countries.
Two million pages are printed every minute across Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). That’s the equivalent of chopping down 63 trees per minute* or a volume of paper to cover almost 17.5 football stadium. If the paperless office may still be a myth, the "less-paper" office is a very tangible, measureable and achievable target which is now integrated in most corporate policies.
Here are the top 3 paper usage technologies that firms, large and small, we work with, have implemented.
With 114.3 billion business emails sent and received globally each day, email is one of most proliferant communication platforms available today. Among other things, confidential data (key financials, client information, patent filings etc.) is channelled via email daily. Email is meant to be used to collaborate with colleagues, teams, external parties etc and in this processes many attachments are sent back and forth to various recipients for review, comment and amendment. There is nothing new here BUT, have you ever thought about the rate at which these sensitive documents are actually replicated during this process? It is a cause for security concern, here’s why…
[ This paper was originally published in LSN Briefing Magazine - March 2014 ]
Nila Hirani at Nikec Solutions on how email can help you manage the risks around leavers, from retaining contacts to reducing the risks of fraud and non-compliance.
Networking and relationships play a huge part in growing business today, making it all the more essential to understand it, manage it and leverage your contacts.
If, just like us, part of your business is comprised of solutions that are hosted in the cloud, you have important personal assets online, or you recently bought something online, your heart probably stopped for a second when you first heard about the Heartbleed bug. “Massive security bug”, “Devastating worldwide security flaw”… we all saw something similar making the headlines. Should I remove my documents stored online? Should I quickly look in my bank account and check if anything is missing?
Yes, when such news reaches the headlines in non IT magazines, when all the net security people around the world are in panic mode, it’s probably time to have a serious look at what is actually going on.
In terms of “big bugs” hurting big names of the web such as Facebook, Amazon, Dropbox, there’s only a few that reach the level of damages that Heartbleed can cause. But is everyone actually affected? Fortunately not, starting with most financial institutions and other sites (including Nikec’s) that don’t use the OpenSSL technology. Relief!
Let’s take a moment to clarify the topic and understand what we are talking about. Here is what you need to know about Heartbleed.
In 1929, the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy established that any two people can be connected to each other in a maximum of six steps - the "6 degrees of separation" also known as the "6 handshakes theory". In 1994, Kevin Bacon was the centre of a student's challenge at Pennsylvania's Albright College. The challenge was to connect every film actor to Bacon in six cast lists or fewer. Bacon thought the game would die out but it never did and instead grew beyond anyone’s expectation. Following the concept, he launched a website (sixdegrees.org) that brings together people interested in helping good causes.
Networking and relationships play a huge part in growing business today, making it all the more essential to understand it, manage it and leverage your contacts.
A picture paints a thousand words - this also holds true in the business world. For instance many of us convert spreadsheets with what appears to look like a meaningless stream of numbers, into charts and graphs. This not only helps uncover key trends but adds value to the information.
The above is just a simple example but with the implosion of information in today’s digital era, we need help in seeing the wood for the trees – a way to mine through what is a lot of unstructured information to unearth the true meaning or context in a clear, logical manner and understand its actual value.
Do you have a single repository where all matter related documents are stored or do these reside in multiple locations? If these are in various locations, how much time does your employee spend trawling through each repository to find what they are looking for?
An IDC report suggests that the average cost for an information worker to search for documents can amount up to £12000 per person per year*. This is substantial, especially when multiplied by the number of workers that exist in any given firm.
Lawyers and their teams are inundated with matter and research related documents which come in a wide range of formats (pdfs, videos, html…) and that can be found in various places such as a user’s email inbox, document management system (DMS), intranet or mobile devices. Good document organisation and efficient sharing has now become a key factor for productivity and growth.
Nikec solutions speaks to Lee Biggenden at Nephos Technologies who provide consultancy, management and technology services to organisations that are seeking to optimise their cloud strategy.
As an independent Cloud Broker with no Cloud space to sell, Nephos Technologies acts as an unbiased independent adviser. We asked Lee about the current state of Cloud technology, how it answers to in professional environments requirements but also how to differentiate Cloud vendors and how to approach the data security question when moving to the Cloud.
As the business world moves faster, lawyers are expected to respond to a client’s demand swiftly and consequently need to produce documents quicker than ever. With the different processes involved between the creation and the completion of a document (initial scanning, editing, reviewing, approval and sharing) – i.e. the document lifecycle – teams must stay sharp and consistent to meet those shorter response times.
Digitalisation has revolutionised the speed at which we work with documents but the use of latest technologies can further enhance this. Here are some of the instrumental technologies that will help optimise your document life cycle, without requiring an army of IT experts to manage.
