Evaluating Carbon-Reducing Impact of Document Management Systems

A Document Management System (DMS) helps store, search, track, share, and retrieve documents of different types including text files, spreadsheets, presentations, and images. A DMS is a core technology used by several companies for managing their electronic documents and is often the central component of content management systems. A DMS may be used locally, on a network, or in the cloud. A question that one might ask is whether a DMS actually helps reduce carbon footprint since ICT (information and communication technologies) overhead is incurred when using DMS. In this paper we evaluated the carbon-reducing impact of a DMS using the assessment framework developed by the Global e-Sustainment Initiative and found that DMS helps reduce carbon footprint by more than 1400 kgCO2e/day. These savings are obtained regardless of the mode in which the DMS is used: completely electronic, converting archival documents to electronic and then remaining completely electronic, or in a recurring mode where physical documents and electronic versions co-exist.