Print and Mail - A Risky Business 

Have you thought about privacy and security lately? It's worthwhile to periodically review how your document workflow protects the private information that may be flowing through your shop. Over time, new jobs come in and documents can change. Government regulations can change too. These events can render long-standing security procedures inadequate or obsolete. Revising the procedures to meet the current needs is a simple way to avoid the disaster that a privacy violation can become.

And there's always the human factor to consider. We've seen it happen over and over in different print/mail operations - after months of never detecting an error the employees start taking short cuts with quality control. Oh, the sign-offs may still get done, but the processes meant to prevent the accidental disclosure of private information aren't faithfully followed. Unless there is repetitive reinforcement by management, including some in-person observation and double-checking, mistakes that should have been caught make it out the door.

At Risk: Your company, your department, and you

The exposure to risk is fairly high considering the volume of mail generated by most of our clients. A single mistake that results in a mail recipient getting access to private information belonging to another customer can spark a firestorm of knee-jerk reactions from executive management and other consequences. And a misguided employee who tries to use protected information for his own benefit can set off a public relations nightmare.

Certainly mistakes can happen. And it's pretty hard to keep a trusted employee from taking advantage of whatever weakness he can find in your data and document workflow if he really wants to. But not having preventative measures and training established, or not following the procedures as prescribed can make things even worse.

Besides the ethical and legal difficulties an organization and its management might encounter as the result of a privacy breach, there are other considerations as well. If you are an outsource service provider a perceived lack of oversight could lead to the loss of business - not only from the affected customer but from others as well. And for in-plant operations who are always justifying their value to corporate financial people that want to outsource their work, a preventable security problem could become an indefensible incident. Jobs will be lost - maybe even yours.

Many shops have adopted automated solutions that take human error and inattention out of the equation. Elements of an automated document factory (ADF) can look at every printed document and every mail piece, stopping the operation and issuing alerts should something seem unusual. But not everyone has those capabilities. Budget constraints may have prevented operations managers from investing in all the technology that is necessary to prevent errors or detect them when they occur at any place in the workflow. They may have integrity controls on the inserters, for example, but not on the printers or at the hand work stations. Or they may not have automated reprint capabilities, leaving them exposed to uncatchable errors in a manually-intensive process. Perhaps surprisingly, there are still plenty of shops that rely on the clipboard and batch-balancing approach to quality control.

Here's a secret - follow the procedures

You work with what you've got. You set up procedures within your means to at least catch errors before the mail leaves your facility. But mistakes can still happen. Usually, they could have been prevented.

In over three decades of working in print and mail operations I have witnessed exactly one operational mistake that couldn't have been caught by any of the existing procedures in the shop. That was a fluke that couldn't be duplicated and remains unexplained to this day. All the rest of the errors that made it into the mail would have been prevented or caught had procedure been followed.

Schedule reviews

Reinforcing the rules, regularly examining the processes for vulnerabilities, and employee training are necessary to ensure that operator and supervisor procedures are taken seriously and performed as specified. I have even been known to purposely generate catchable errors when I suspected that the staff was slacking. Serving the same purpose as a pop quiz in high school, intentionally testing the system can keep the group on their toes and paying attention.

We recommend re-visiting your quality control, security, and privacy rules twice a year. Set a reminder in your calendar and really do it. If the review is not taken seriously by management, the staff won't be as vigilant as you'd like. Experiencing the painful fallout from a privacy violation just once will make you sorry the steps that could have prevented it were not taken.