16 Mar Improve Productivity and Reduce Business Risk
Even though documents drive communication in all enterprises worldwide, document management and collaboration is a very dry topic that everyone takes for granted. Nobody wants to spend much time talking about it or reading about it. The startling negative impact of document management and collaboration on productivity and business risk outlined below may provide the basis for your call to action to address problems you have been seeing in your department for years.
According to Docurated’s The State of Document Management Report 2014, 62% of IT executives say they have prioritized document management this year. Why is that? It’s all related to employee productivity, risk management and improving the bottom line. Here are a few snippets from other surveys that provide some valuable background information.
According to that same Docurated report, 60% of organizations report content growing at a rate of 100% per year. Managing that growth is a huge challenge.
What happens to all that content? According to various reputable sources such as Gartner Group and Laserfiche, 7.5% of all documents get lost. Additionally, 90% of documents get shuffled, which leads to a nose dive in productivity when employees are forced to waste time searching around for them. It also significantly increases the business risk associated with those lost and shuffled documents.
Even worse, Professionals spend 50% of their time looking for files, but only 5% to 15% of their time reading the required information. From a business risk perspective, how many times do Professionals work on the incorrect version of a document that they had to find?
Clearly, there is a lot of time being wasted by employees finding, managing and collaborating on documents! The business risk could be significant depending on the document content.
The most common way people collaborate on documents is by emailing each version as an attachment. As more people are included in the collaboration, the problems start to multiply and document updates become a nightmare.
A common method of document distribution is to post a document to a web site. However, if the end user needs access to the document while offline or if the web site is difficult to navigate, the end user will probably store the document on their desktop and presto, they lose version control.
Version control and document distribution are a big problem in many industries worldwide due to a large volume of documents; a large number of reviewers for each document; and a large number of employees creating documents for review; all colliding at once. Document distribution by email and a highly distributed workforce exacerbates the problem.
A common solution to address these issues is to implement an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) System. That is a great solution for the IT team since it captures all the information in one spot and securely retains that information for as long as required. Reports can be generated and on the surface, that seems like the ideal solution to all the documentation problems.
However, while an Enterprise Content Management System may be a great solution for IT, a study by Forrester in 2011 identified that over 60% of ECM users are not satisfied with their ECM. How can a system be great for IT, yet not address the end user problems? The top issues for dissatisfaction with an ECM are inadequate training of end users due to a lack of time, resources or money and even after training the end users can’t find the files they want to use.
There are two sources of frustration for finding the files. First, the normal training for an Enterprise Content Management System takes several hours and if the employee isn’t using the system on a regular basis, they forget how to use it. Second, the IT team completes a data analysis to establish the necessary file and folder structure to store the data efficiently and effectively for the entire enterprise. However, for the end user who didn’t establish that file/folder structure, it can be extremely difficult to hunt through the complex file structure to find a file. Eventually, the end user gives up and they start storing files on their desktop. At that point, both IT and the end user lose the benefits of the Enterprise Content Management System. Does that sound familiar?
What if you could implement a solution for your department that combined all the benefits of an Enterprise Content Management System with an application that is end user focused? In essence, you can have your cake and eat it too!
SavvyDox provides an easy to use end user focused experience for document distribution and collaboration that is a complementary solution to an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) System. Training of end users is completed in a 10 minute video tutorial and the system is so intuitive that most users don’t even need any training. Since SavvyDox is cloud based, you can have it up and running in a day or two and you don’t even have to bother IT! SavvyDox is a SaaS based solution, so implementation is inexpensive and can probably fit within your departmental expense budget.
With SavvyDox, the end user files documents on their desktop or mobile device in a folder structure that makes sense to them. They can then locate the document with 3 mouse clicks! SavvyDox ensures that those documents are always synchronized to the ECM and ensures that everyone always has the current copy of a document on their desktop or mobile device. In addition, SavvyDox provides a new paradigm for mobile document collaboration that is beyond anything available in the market today.
Just think – the problem with 7.5% of documents getting lost goes away. The problem of professionals spending 50% of their time looking for documents and 5% to 15% of their time reading them goes away. The problem of 90% of documents getting shuffled goes away. The business risks associated with those problems disappear. Imagine the productivity improvements in your department from a solution like SavvyDox.
SavvyDox uses the Microsoft Word platform for documents, so your end users can open documents from your ECM and distribute them to reviewers for collaboration. In addition to Microsoft Word, SavvyDox also supports Microsoft PowerPoint and any PDF’d copy of documents. You can even store the final copy back in the ECM to maintain the integrity of that IT document repository.
For more information, check out www.savvydox.com .