Three things you do with document management that your organization wishes was an April Fool’s joke

Guest blog from our Marketing Director, Lacey Walker.

 

As a Marketing Director approaching April Fool’s, I gave some serious thought to something clever we could do to utilize our messaging in line with April Fool’s day. Instead, I seemed stuck on ideas that plagued the industry I am in, and I kept thinking to myself, “Some of these things seem like April Fool’s jokes, or at least like things an organization wishes were jokes.” So instead of something silly this year, I want to highlight the top three things we hear our customers struggle with that sound a lot like April Fool’s jokes.

1. You don’t adopt the technologies your company has put a lot of time and money into implementing. When an organization decides to implement a new technology, it’s not taken lightly. It is typically a decision based on a current or upcoming need. It usually involves decision makers across the organization, a ton of man hours, and in many cases a lot of cold hard cash. According to AIIM only 11% of organizations believe that their SharePoint project can be deemed a success, and this metric is often heavily influenced by a lack of adoption within the organization. Change is hard, we know it is. Organizations can help solve adoption through a variety of techniques. One of the most successful ways we’ve seen is making sure to involve your user group as part of the decision makers in the project. Another is to make sure you aren’t skimping on the functionalities requested by your employees. Sure, it might save you a little money and a little time, but you’ve made it this far; don’t let the whole thing fall flat just to save a little.
2. You implement your own technologies that you think are better. To add insult to injury, employees who refuse to adopt the technologies put into place by organizations are often going around IT and using the solutions that they deem best (very funny, people!). AIIM estimates that as many as 30% of employees have implemented their own technology preferences (e.g. Box) without IT’s knowledge. This can feel like a big joke when these decisions come back and bite the organization. While implementing a quick fix seems like the right thing to do, it can cause long standing compliance and information governance issues. We recommend keeping an open door policy for employees and IT to discuss technologies they need and bring ones already implemented to IT’s attention. Synchronization solutions can help bring these external systems into compliance if IT is aware of the issue.
3. You don’t follow proper naming or metadata policies for documents. Depending on the size and complexity of your organization, your documents need to be easily indexed and searched. If your company doesn’t automatically generate at least part of file titles and metadata you likely have a document naming and metadata plan that requires some manual work. In an effort to save time, employees will often skirt these plans, especially when working between disparate systems with different rule sets. While this seems harmless in the moment, not only does it play a joke on the company’s overall document management, employees often end up playing the biggest joke on themselves, when they can’t easily find the document later. According to a McKinsey report, employees often spend nearly 2 hours a day searching for information. File naming and metadata plans exist to organize company data as well as make it easy to locate the documents in the future.

The moral of the story is document management is no joke people.