Data Management System

Background

The client company, a secure document storage and shredding service, had built out digital data storage capabilities and wanted to explore integrating the two capabilities into a combined service offering. They hypothesized that customers would potentially be interested in secure storage of both physical and digital media and needed to understand customers’ needs around each.

Process

I spoke with major stakeholders within the organization, including Product, IT, Development, and Account Services. From this, I was able to gain an understanding of the firm’s capabilities as well as insights into the needs of typical customers.

Additionally, I interviewed a number of customers, both of the physical document storage service and the digital data storage service to gather insights into their needs and pain points with relation to information storage and retrieval.

Findings and Recommendations

• Many customers, especially in industries such as legal and medical, still maintain large amounts of physical files and may have to do so in order to maintain regulatory compliance
• Accessing physical files which have been stored off-site is time-consuming, as customers must submit a request and then wait for the file box(es) to be delivered
• Customers value the ease and speed of access that digital files provide – often they need their files NOW
• At times, customers may be away from the office when the need for a particular file arises
• Customers need to be able to easily and securely destroy physical files and delete digital files that may contain personal information, at times in order to maintain regulatory compliance
• Customers need to be able to find and access the information they need quickly

Based on these findings, it seemed that customers would potentially benefit from a service that allowed them to manage and access both physical and digital files seamlessly. Through web and mobile interfaces, customers would be able to search any files they had, digital or physical. Digital files could be access instantly and physical files could be requested for delivery. If a customer needed quicker access to a physical file, they could request that the physical file be scanned and sent digitally; digital scanning service could also be purchased by customers who only had physical files and would like to have digital backups made.

Additionally, customers would be able to request that physical files be shredded and/or digital files securely deleted and set up an automated schedule for files to be destroyed. The service would even be able to alert the customer if they had old files that may no longer be needed, so that they could be destroyed.

To illustrate the concept, I produced a number of flow diagrams outlining the actions of users, interactions in web and mobile interfaces, and actions taken by the service itself during different usage scenarios. Additionally, I produced wireframes to illustrate the interface of the updated customer portal.