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 is also a critical decision when it comes to modernising the IS of SMEs.
The decision usually focuses on the tree structure and shared access. However, 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 the processes of innovation, quality and commitment within the organisation.
Among the best practices in document management, here are 5 mistakes to avoid:
Mistake 1: looking for an Electronic Document Management system
When you renew your document storage and sharing system (internal code name: EDM), you naturally go for the same category when considering the subject.
But 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 the question needs to be asked again:
- What are we using our documents for?
- Which are legal and essential, and which simply 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 organised? Is our documentation dynamic, with frequent additions and changes?
- How is new documentation created? In what form? Can we change this process of writing/creating documents?
When you ask yourself 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 practices on our smartphones have evolved (from text messaging to whatsapp-style messaging, for example), so too has the management of internal information . It is done in many different ways depending on your objectives and your business processes.
Mistake No. 2: Keeping the same processes, the same organisation, the same corporate culture
Equipping your organisation with software cannot be a simple task of convenience, carried out according to a grid of needs established "in theory" in a set of specifications. Otherwise you automatically become an employee of Microsoft without realising 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 organisation: innovation, transparency, moving forward gradually.
By automatically buying 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 and employees with long, complex or repetitive procedures for carrying out simple tasks. Post-it notes in a tree structure, overly-programmatic navigation or procedures hidden in multiple drop-down menus.
You also have to worry about task automation, document validation circuits, task managers linked to documents, the acquisition of text or simple figures in a non-documentary format. Imagine for a moment that all documents of less than twenty lines, and tables of less than 50, were eliminated in favour of wiki-type documentation or online notes and tables?
You also need to ensure that you are 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 step towards setting up a genuine organisational tool.
Mistake no. 4: compartmentalising collaboration tools and EDMs
Before thinking in terms of EDM, you need to make life easier for information, in all its forms, collaboration to enable projects to be completed on time, or simply to manage day-to-day interactions so that nothing gets lost. Without reproducing in the new tools the horrors of meetings or email chains: doing things differently to do them better.
So we need to look at the life 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, good organisation of groups or discussion threads, to the questions that are important to you, and even to useful documentation. Over the next few years, you should consider working on a targeted approach to recommending similar documents 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 the same 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 life cycle: collaborative working, EDM, archiving, securing documents, etc.
Each stage is different and requires different tools, different functions or different use of the same functions to achieve the right workflow. Information is first instantaneous, then structured in a longer post or a collaborative note and finally put into a document if necessary. It is important to have a tool that allows for these different stages, as they produce the necessary attrition of the information to be stored.
You probably think of your document management as that of a personal laptop that you've been using for 4 years, with documents piled up in a more or less orderly fashion. All of a sudden, you're thinking in terms of nomenclature, tree structure, archiving and the organised storage of my documents. That's quite normal. But before archiving, you need the tools to produce, to make information accessible and to keep it alive so that it can be properly updated. So you need to find the right balance and not have tools for creating and exchanging information that are already in an archiving mindset, at the risk of being the digital place most shunned by your employees (sharepoint). In the same way, security must be differentiated according to the time and criticality of the communication. Documents (which are easily transferable and modifiable, with complex rights management) are not necessarily the right format.
Finally, you can probably imagine that this re-imagined lifecycle does not apply to repeating the same workflow with a large number of documents. Because you have a lot of legacy, because you are a production-focused organisation.
On the contrary, by automating the repetitive part of the workflow and, on the other hand, by allowing great flexibility in the channels used to exchange documents, you will considerably reduce the number of documents that need to be sent back and forth.
Article translated from French