COMMENTARY--We are all guilty of it. You take an old document, cut and paste a few paragraphs, type in some new thoughts, save it with a new title and e-mail out to a dozen people for their edits and suggestions. Pretty soon you are buried in multiple different versions with multiple, often conflicting, edits. After a lengthy “stare and compare” process you combine the changes into one document, save the final document and are good to go. (Go onto repeat this same process, that is, to each of the business documents piled on your desk.)When realizing how often we as individuals handle document content this way, it is frightening to consider how this approach can ensure significant problems at a company-wide level. One obvious problem is the time it takes to inefficiently herd the many different edits together. Another major concern is the potential to unwittingly share sensitive information. For example, the document you originally save over could contain hidden metadata—comments, edits and dates that were made in previous versions of the document. New edits could also be added to this metadata and if not properly stripped can lead to some embarrassing, or potentially damaging, information leaking outside the office walls.
There’s no escaping it. Most businesses dedicate a significant amount of resources to managing and creating documents. A recent Gartner report states that organizations spend 10 percent to 14 percent of their time creating documents. That’s at least half a day of company resources per week. It is vital for companies to communicate the importance of managing document content throughout the entire organization and, ultimately, to prevent any content-related issues that would have detrimental consequences that may even impact a company’s bottom line.
In an attempt to help clarify the major issues companies are facing, here is a list of the top ten tips companies should keep in mind when it comes to managing the content of their documents while also increasing overall productivity.
1. Measure document chaos
Establish the scale of the problem in your organization. Are most of the documents you produce critical to your business and do most involve contributions from a team of people before completion? If you fall into the heavy document user category, then your organization needs tools and applications that address the area of content productivity.
2. Focus on ROI and high productivity
Make sure that your revenue producing employees are focused on those activities that have the highest ROI, and employ practices that make them more productive. Time spent reworking corrupted documents and inputting edits into documents can take much time away from more lucrative activities.
3. Manage the amount of e-mail
E-mail use has become ubiquitous for us all and the amount of mail and attachments that are sent and received is tremendous. It’s hard to keep track of it all. Employees need a way to easily manage their collaboration with others on documents that they have sent out via e-mail.
4. Deal with multiple contributors
Today’s methods for keeping track of many changes and edits to a document are uninspired, to say the least. Understanding who made what changes, when and where can be a tremendously frustrating process. Then, trying to actually incorporate those changes that you agree with only enhances the problem. It is important to keep in mind that much time is spent on this seemingly simple task. One method to keep track of each change is in a document audit file. Having this outline of who, what and when in terms of content changes can help not only with managing edits, but also give companies needed reporting for many different government regulation issues.
5. Work the way you always have done
Software should not enforce new working practices on your employees and should not require significant training. End users only become frustrated and do not use the software in the way it is intended to be used. Every business is different and many people have specific ways of working and don’t appreciate change. Be sure to choose software that is flexible and allows your users to work in the way in which they always have done.
6. Support better collaboration
Global organizations are already collaborating in teams, both ad hoc and organized. These organizations should understand that teams need supporting infrastructure to increase their productivity and prevent collaborative confusion.
7. Understand what you are sending outside of your organization
Awareness of the risks of document metadata is very low. How many times have you used an old document (client proposals and contacts, pricing sheets, press releases, etc.) as a template for a new document? On your computer screen it may appear that you have deleted all of the old text, but it can reappear on your customer’s screen. The need for automated removal of historical information from documents is critical—employees can’t be relied upon to manually remove all document metadata before they e-mail out documents. End users expect filtering and checks to be carried out automatically.
8. Reducing turnaround time
The importance of delivering information on time can drastically impact overall deadlines. Set deadlines for individual team members to turn around their edits on reviewed documents to ensure that document managers have the time that they need to incorporate all of the changes into their final document version.
9. Understand the cost implications
How many people in your company are aware of the cost of missed deadlines? Does anyone in your company know what this cost is? By understanding the implications for the company and the team, rather than relying on the individuals to deliver information, businesses have more of a vested interest in completing their tasks on time.
10. Get the process moving
Making change in any business is a challenge. Clear targets of how much information there is to manage and the cost implications of improving the processes involved, form the basis of getting content productivity moving in your business.
There are a number of issues that need to be acknowledged and a number of changes that need to be made in order to improve efficiency and reduce risks for companies producing important documents. In the end, getting any initiative off the ground requires buy-in from company management, departmental heads and board directors. The sooner the stakeholders wake up to the challenge, the sooner the company can reap the rewards.
biography
Bringing over 20 years experience to Workshare, Joe helped create $3 billion market valuation as an executive for industry leaders in document creation (Interleaf), multimedia (Macromedia), 3D graphics (Autodesk) and online CRM (Kana). Previous to Workshare, Joe was CEO at Liquid Engines, co-founder and CEO at NetDialog--a venture-backed firm sold in 1999 to Kana, and general manager at Autodesk Discreet.
