5 mistakes to avoid when choosing or renewing your EDM
Electronic Document Management is often the second most important IT decision in many projects, after computers and the basic office suite. It's also a critical decision when it comes to modernizing the IS of SMEs.
The decision usually focuses on tree structure and shared access. Yet selecting an EDM tool that goes further, and extends towards productivity, knowledge management and collaborative working, can turn a routine decision into a powerful tool for innovation, quality and organizational commitment.
Among the best practices in document management, here are 5 mistakes to avoid:
Mistake no. 1: looking for an Electronic Document Management system
When you renew your document storage and sharing system (internal code name: EDM), you naturally look to the same category to address the issue.
However, EDM software forces you not to change any of your practices, not to re-examine the relevance of the document format, their number, their classification, and your own internal processes.
Perhaps it's time to start asking the question again:
- What do we need our documents for?
- Which are legal and essential, and which merely share information in a structured form?
- How accessible are these documents? Are they easy to find? Are they searched for? Are they used?
- How is the exchange of documents organized? Is our documentation dynamic, with frequent enrichment and evolution?
- How is new documentation created? What form does it take? Is it possible to modify the process of writing/creating documents?
In asking these questions, one thing becomes clear: your challenge is not just to classify your documents, but to manage internal knowledge, its circulation, and the exchange around it.
And just as our personal smartphone practices have evolved (from text messaging to whatsapp-style messaging, for example), so too has the management of internal information . It's done in many different ways, depending on your objectives and business processes.
Mistake no. 2: keeping the same processes, the same organization, the same corporate culture
Equipping a company with software cannot be a simple task of convenience, carried out according to a grid of needs established "in theory" in a specification. Otherwise, you automatically become an employee of Microsoft thinking, without realizing it.
Like any piece of equipment, software must have some ambition and appeal to drive change. It's a good opportunity to re-engage with a tool, to change the way it is perceived and used, and to promote values that are buried deep within the organization: innovation, transparency, moving forward gradually.
By automatically purchasing solutions that don't bring about change, you're giving yourself a false sense of security. The security of no longer questioning the way you work.
Mistake no. 3: not thinking about automation
In 2019, you no longer need to tire out the work routines of your colleagues, collaborators and employees with long, complex or repetitive procedures to carry out simple tasks. Tree post-it notes, overly-programmed navigations or procedures hidden in multiple drop-down menus.
You also have to worry about task automation, document validation circuits, task managers coupled with documents, the acquisition of text or simple numerical data in a non-documentary format. Imagine if all documents of less than twenty lines, and tables of less than 50, were eliminated in favor of wiki-style documentation or online notes and tables?
You also need to make sure you're using a tool that will think about and evolve towards the use of all this data over time. Will it be easy to use and format? Will they be relevant to employees?
Putting these aspects within everyone's reach is essential if you are to turn your current EDM problems into a real organizational tool.
Mistake No. 4: compartmentalizing collaboration tools and EDM
Before thinking in terms of EDM, it's all about facilitating the life of information, in all its forms, collaboration enabling projects to be completed on time, or simply managing day-to-day interactions without anything getting lost. Without reproducing in the new tools the horrors of meetings or e-mail chains: do things differently to do things better.
So we need to look at the life cycle of information: making it pleasant to create, easy to modify (with several hands), easy to use (read, validate) for as long as necessary, and efficient to archive without altering (if necessary).
You therefore need easy access, via a good internal search engine, group organization or discussion threads, to the questions that are important to you, and even to useful documentation. Over the next few years, you should also consider working on a targeted approach to recommending related documents , in order to increase the use value of your document base, enabling employees to make full use of its potential.
All this requires a lot of collaboration tools: too often, you think that they are just communication tools, whereas they are at the heart of the good life of information. You can either combine them in a single tool, or make them communicate with each other. Above all, avoid creating a communication silo and an EDM silo.
Mistake no. 5: forgetting the information lifecycle: collaborative working, EDM, archiving, document security
Each stage is different, and requires different tools and functionalities, or different use of the same functionalities to achieve the right workflow. Information is first instantaneous, then structured in a longer post or collaborative note, and finally put into a document if necessary. It's important to have a tool that allows these different times, as they produce a necessary attrition of the information to be kept.
You probably think of your document management as that of a personal laptop that you've been using for the past 4 years, with documents piling up in a more or less orderly fashion. As a result, you're thinking in terms of nomenclature, tree structure, archiving and the organized storage of my documents. That's quite normal. But before archiving, you need tools to produce and make information accessible and lively, so that it can be kept up to date. You need to find the right mix, and not have tools for creating and exchanging information that are already in an archiving logic, at the risk of being the digital place most shunned by your colleagues (sharepoint). Similarly, security must be differentiated according to the time and criticality of the communication. Documents (easily transferable, modifiable, with complex rights management) are not necessarily the right format.
Finally, you can imagine that this re-engineered lifecycle doesn't apply to repeating the same workflow with a large number of documents. Because you have a lot of legacy, because you're a production-focused organization.
On the contrary, by automating the repetitive part of the workflow and, conversely, by allowing great flexibility in the channels used to exchange documents, you will considerably reduce the number of round trips.
Article translated from French