Documents are the DNA of communication within an organisation. These days, everyone in the organisation is a content creator, with the term 'document' being broad enough to include items as diverse as physical paper, electronic communication, a thumbprint or a voice recording. Much of the content organisations manage is unstructured - e-mails, images, rich media, forms and more.
It is imperative to know what information is kept where and how to find it.
Shiona Blundell is divisional manager: communication and business process outsourcing, at Bytes Document Solutions.
To add to the complexity of multiple forms of documents, technology has also changed radically. This means people are accessing documents from multiple access points such as PCs, tablets, mobile devices and the good old filing cabinet.
All of this information, which includes the company's intellectual property and other competitively sensitive information - needs to be shared, stored, distributed, consumed and actioned. Furthermore, it is imperative to know what information is kept where and how to find it. Anyone who has searched for a document created by someone who has left the organisation, for example, will understand how important that is.
All in order
Good document management systems, which come with best practices for document creation, change management, storage, indexing, retrieval, and archiving, also help businesses comply with regulatory requirements.
Compliance has become a major preoccupation for South African businesses. It involves doing specific things in certain ways and maintaining data as evidence that these have been done as required. Maintaining documents is a key component of compliance management. Properly maintained compliance data helps businesses demonstrate their compliance to the authorities, and where necessary, in a court of law. Best practices adopted by document management systems can also create audit trails that can prove invaluable as evidence.
Cost, too, is a key factor. Research indicates that one in every 20 documents created in an organisation is lost. At an average cost-to-create of R2 000 per document, the figures can add up rather quickly. In addition, people often simply forget what they called a document and where they saved it. The research shows that of the average 12 minutes employees spend on a document, nine of those are taken up by the process of looking for it. If that's not enough to make companies sit up and take note, studies also show that it takes about R200 000 to fill a four-drawer filing cabinet and R16 000 per year to maintain it.
An effective records management program enables companies to save money by eliminating the unnecessary storage of physical records and reducing the unnecessary retention of e-mail or other electronic records.
Teamwork
The manual workflow of documents across a business process can be slow and prone to errors. Automating workflow ensures that documents move along at an appropriate pace and to the right people at the right time. Routing and workflow capabilities provided by document management solutions facilitate stronger teamwork and increased productivity. Dispersed knowledge workers can easily collaborate on a single document or a collection of content in a shared project or team workspace, and communicate through blogs or Web conferencing.
The resulting enhanced team performance can lead to more rapid product innovations, increased sales wins, faster order fulfilment, and other improvements that directly impact customer satisfaction and bottom line growth.
For many organisations, the question is where to start. Is it more important to focus on paper-based legacy information or on the electronic data that is stored in various different systems?
The simple answer is that it depends on the nature of the business and what is most important in that context. The document management industry in general is seeing a massive spike in the requirement for back scanning - the scanning of a legacy document archive into an electronic document management solution. The documents are made searchable, so that they can be quickly and efficiently accessed, saving both time and space. The advantage of starting off by digitising paper documents is that this helps to lay the groundwork for the development of an electronic archive, while also enabling the business to move paper-based information off site where it can be stored more cost-effectively.
Some companies choose to kick off their development of an electronic document management solution by focusing on electronic data. It is advisable not to take on both at the same time, because it is too complex a project to attempt to organise both paper and digital information at the same time in terms of the change management involved, and the need to create an entirely new workflow throughout the organisation.
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