Jumping to Digital Means Jumping to a Sustainable Future

(Paper waiting to be recycled at a recycling facility. Often we forget that this process uses valuable energy.)

“Going green” – it’s a concept that we hear a lot about these days. We hear about it on commercials, in our offices, via government initiatives that exhort us to help the environment. Everyone agrees that helping the environment is important – but many disagree over what methods are best to accomplish this goal. Often in our rush to change light bulbs and split our recycling into cans and bottles and plastic, we forget that the most basic ideas are the best ones.

At FileBank, our effort to help the environment revolves around one simple goal: to use less paper. And by less paper, in many cases we mean no paper at all. Think about the future in which offices around the nation will be entirely digital – it is not a matter of “if,” but rather “when.” FileBank exists to help businesses transition into that future as quickly as possible. We have many solutions that businesses can take advantage of – and the benefits are literally endless when one considers the positive, permanent environmental impact these solutions have.

Going paperless means so much more than just saving trees. It also means lessening the carbon footprint that will be produced by cutting down and processing those trees for paper. It means less energy wasted on recycling the paper for reuse, and less energy to ship it from place to place and store it. The space needed to accommodate our physical archive space versus our digital servers is a telling comparison: while we need a facility the size of a football field to store documents, we can use a room you could barely park a car in to manage our digital records. As more and more businesses and government entities embrace the paperless lifestyle, the need for giant storage facilities will slowly disappear. As energy resources transition to renewable methods rather than carbon belching fossil fuels, the whole planet will benefit from these efforts to modernize how America does business.

So if you’re considering going paperless, make sure to think not only of the benefits you’ll have tomorrow, but the benefits that generations will have in the future. When you’re thinking about the costs, make sure to also think of the environmental costs of not acting soon.

Since going green is such an important theme of FileBank’s work, I will continue to update you on news, projects and other initiatives related to this topic.

Stay tuned!

Vanessa Banti
Master Archivist

FileBank Launches LL 84 Initiative To Assist Property Managers in NYC

Interacting with government policy is one of the most challenging tasks a business can take on. Recently, that challenge in New York City became a little bit more difficult with the passage of local law 84. LL # 84 is a recent measure passed in order to help make NYC’s buildings greener and more energy efficient. According to this law, owners of buildings in the city are responsible for benchmarking how much energy and water they use every year, and then saving this information for 3 years, and making it available for inspection by the government during that time. Though this law might seem like just another example of so much more bureaucratic red tape, FileBank has devised innovative, cost effective solutions that can assist property managers in compliance.

FileBank is prepared to become a property manager’s back office in order to make compliance with LL 84 a breeze instead of a chore. Because of our company’s convenient location in urban New Jersey, we already make frequent deliveries and other work related trips into the city. Our customers already enjoy the benefits of having all the functions of a back office delegated to FileBank: their documents are instantly accessible online through an easy-to-use system, their physical files are available to be delivered to their offices on a one hour or overnight basis, they receive professional help interacting with local government, and their files are shredded in a safe, redundant process when they’ve reached their expiration date. We intend to apply all of these skill sets to clients that want assistance complying with LL 84.

So stay tuned for more news about this exciting new initiative. FileBank is eager to contribute to the creation of a greener community in NYC, and to the bottom line of our business neighbors across the river.

Until next time,

Vanessa Banti
Master Archivist

Metadata: What Digitization Can Tell You About Your Own Organization

One moment of truth arrives for every type of organization: the point at which you have to determine if you are meeting your goals, selling your product, making that difference that you want to make. In the digital era, these types of moments are influenced constantly by the information exchanged over the Internet. To know whether you’ve reached one of them, you need to be connected. And increasingly, to be able to recognize them, you need to have a huge amount of information about your own organization.

Metadata is exactly the type of information that your organization will need to determine if its goals are met. Metadata tells you how your internal numbers have stacked up: whether it has to do with very concrete considerations like accounting and payroll, or less tangible ones like quality of your product, the nature of your client base, etc.

Is it possible to track metadata regarding the documents you store in your office? Of course! At FileBank, part of my job is to keep track of totals regarding various aspects of each client’s account with us. I am able to tell a client about simple tallies like how many boxes of which type they have stored with us, but also which boxes are ready to be destroyed and when, whether the organization will be regularly producing more of the content of those boxes, or whether the majority of the organization’s collection is to be permanently stored. All of this type of information classifies as metadata.

FileBank’s analytics software also takes advantage of metadata, except it takes the numbers on the documents themselves – accounting tallies, for example – and analyzes these numbers to perform numerous types of financial forecasting that will help your business stay ahead of the curve. Our software shows you the precise type of information you need to be prepared for that moment of truth. It arms you with the knowledge to face any situation your organization might encounter, especially an economic one. With the nation’s economy seemingly stuck in a permanent state of volatility, it is knowledge that is sure to come in handy.

So I hope you too will start to embrace metadata in your workplace. Using it will not only put you ahead of the curve in terms of technology, but it will also make the results from your work that much more potent.

Until next time,

Vanessa Banti
Master Archivist