The problem with having to decide what is going to go into your document management system before you begin is that it creates a commitment that you will have to live with for a very long time. Inevitably you will have documents in your system that you will never access again, others that you access all of the time and another group that you wish you had put into the system but that you didn’t. The early commitment that you make in document management is based on an unreasonable premise; I know what documents are going to be important to me in the future.
The ever changing environments of business, government regulation, compliance and the global economy all work against us to know what documents will be important in the future and which will be obsolete tomorrow. The solution is simple – keep everything.
Document Management Software
The challenge for document management software, and document management systems, is the overhead most of them require in order to get documents into them in a usable format. Scanning documents is labor intensive, requires hardware and frankly is a horrible job to punish any employee with. Because scanning documents into a document management system is so painful, document management providers suggest outsourcing (shipping your documents to lower labor communities), crowd-sourcing (making everyone in the company do their part), and simple brute force (relegate the job to the lowest cost internal people).
The issues with these approaches are obvious.
Shipping documents to other people in other facilities is not cost efficient. In addition, it opens up the risk that documents will be misplaced, private documents may be compromised, or that documents will be unavailable when they are needed because they are neither on-site nor have they made it into the document management software yet. Crowd-sourcing is certainly the most efficient however it requires everyone to participate in the same way as we ask people to clean-up after themselves in the lunch room or at the coffee station. If this is going really well for you then you might have a shot. See all of the problems described above to better understand the issues around brute force.
For a document management system to be effective, using the document management software has to be more convenient than not using the document management software. This is a pretty simple concept that we witness in change management all the time. If you want people to change, create a solution that is more convenient – easy. Ok, maybe it sounds easy, but how do you do it?
Document Management Systems
The solution for creating a document management solution that is going to work for your organization, and be MORE convenient than not using document management is to move ahead on the workflow process chain. Every document follows a process of creation, completion, delivery and storage, with the potential for several iterations occurring during the completion and delivery stages as well as reversals of that order. If your document management system captures every document automatically earlier in the process, like in the creation, completion or delivery stages, then you eliminate the thought and effort required to put the documents into document management at storage.
To win with document management the solution is simple – capture documents as they completed, not just when they are stored.