Welcome to the June edition of the Document Manager eNewsletter, which includes an interesting piece from Nigel Dews of Restore Records Management on the pros and cons of outsourcing document archives.

I have been editing DM for over 20 years now, and I can clearly remember that in the late 90s a significant part of the magazine's editorial - and a lot of its advertising space - was given over to various bureaus and BPOs of one form or another. Clearly the idea of getting someone else to manage your document archives is far from radical, but according to Nigel there are still many organisations who have concerns about the concept itself.

His article covers some of these potential barriers, including what we might consider the obvious (and easily dealt with) ones: will our records remain confidential, how is data integrity protected, will we still be GDPR-compliant, and so on - but one that hadn't really occurred to me was 'Will I ever get to speak to a real person?'. As Nigel says, "It's a good question because being human is crucial to modern business."

As we hear more and more about how AI is going to replace human interaction in routine predictable processes, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that there is a great deal of comfort to be had from knowing that if they have a concern, your customers can pick up the phone and speak to you.

David Tyler, Editor
Document Manager Magazine

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