The 'inside - out' factor
With most business conducted outside of traditional corporate networks, the need for document
management is increasing…
TIMS3 is an industry leading solution that provides a streamlined, cost effective way to improve information sharing, manage projects and automate business processes. Originally developed in the mid 1980s by Giffels Associates Limited, a large engineering and architectural consulting practice in Toronto, Canada, TIMS3 integrates both Windows and Web based technologies to enable multiple organizations to work together in a unified system that encourages collaboration while still maintaining the principles of document management.
We recently caught up with Brian Gerstmar, Giffels’ Director of Technology Applications, for an informative Question and Answer session.
Q: One of the core components of TIMS3 is document management. Why do you think that many businesses have difficulty embracing the benefits of a DMS?
A: Building a business case for a DMS isn’t straightforward. Associating savings by increasing efficiencies, reducing time spent locating and retrieving lost documents or even recreating documents is not easy to measure. If a supervisor asks an employee how many documents they’ve lost or had to redo in the last six months, you won’t get an honest answer. As a consequence, organizations continue to do business inefficiently and miss out on this opportunity to improve business processes while cutting costs. They feel they can get by without a DMS, until something disastrous happens.
Q: But how often does that happen?
A: It happens more often than you’d think. Ask any IS department how often they need to restore data from their back-up tapes. Within an uncontrolled environment, it is easy to move and delete files or even entire projects. Restoring or correcting documents that have been erroneously edited or duplicated becomes more complicated. These errors can go undetected for weeks and months. Meanwhile authorized staff have added more data to these documents. It becomes quite a challenge to unravel the bad data while retaining the good.
Q: Why do you think document management is only now rising to the top of everyone’s “must-have” list?
A: The most obvious reason is that the sheer volume of digital data that an organization needs to manage is growing exponentially. Implementing standards and procedures is no longer sufficient to ensure proper filing and sharing among employees. This fact is substantiated by studies that show the amount of time an employee spends locating data increases year to year.
Beyond that, there have been three major business developments in the last few years that have increased the need for document management. The first is that business growth through acquisition has increased. Organizations that historically have operated within a single location now have multiple offices, often throughout the world. Establishing corporate policies and having them abided by becomes more difficult, so deploying a document management system with rules embedded in the security structure of the system assists in conformance. In addition, files within a DMS are connected to a database, so searching for files between offices becomes easier.
The second development is the need to collaborate on work with outside consultants more closely. Offices today are practically virtual, with the lines between “us” and “them” becoming increasingly blurred. IS departments do not like the idea of allowing outside personnel inside a corporate firewall. They more readily accept the notion of collaborating via a web-based DMS. These website teams then have the same requirements for security and searching that a multi-office organization has.
The last development is with regards to clients themselves. Gone are the days when clients sat passively by and waited for an official submission to be made at a project milestone. Clients today want to be a part of the decision making process in order to keep the work on track and minimize their risk. Again, the preferred method is to conduct this business on the web so that everyone is looking at the same information in a central location, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from any computer with an internet connection.
Q: It’s almost as if most business is conducted outside of traditional corporate networks.
A: Exactly! We call this the “Inside Out Factor”. If this trend continues, corporate networks look as if they will only be used for company standards, employee information and accounting functions. The real day-to-day money making activity is taking place on the web. The work that every organization does, no matter what the market vertical is, is based on projects that involve several team members in multiple locations. Because the internet is still viewed as the “wild west”, secure web-based document management becomes extremely important. The challenge is to create an integrated system that addresses any of these corporate scenarios so that information is only created once and shared many times.
Q: Isn’t there more to projects than document exchanges?
A: Without a doubt. Documents themselves form the official record of any project. But what decisions were made to get the right information on the documents and how was it communicated? Usually through faxes, telephone conversations and especially e-mail. These methods, though effective, usually leave companies vulnerable because this information doesn’t always become part of the project record. Yet, it can make up a majority of the actual data. If it is controlled and recorded, team accountability will rise.
Clients need to feel confident that the right person communicated the right information, all within a required time frame. Furthermore, the information flow through multiple team members must be traceable to account for all the decision making along the way to the final conclusion. We ourselves have developed these communication management tools so that all data is recorded within the project. Our clients are now refusing to answer any project related queries by e-mail anymore.
Q: It must be difficult for organizations to make that switch, especially when an accepted process is now redefined.
A: It doesn’t have to be. We realized long ago that the best products are those that are easiest to use. No one has the luxury of time or money to conduct one week training sessions each time a new project begins. Working competitively requires immediate team participation and productivity. For these tools to be truly embraced and used consistently on a day to day basis, the learning curve must be minimized. Otherwise, they are simply abandoned and their effectiveness is lost.
The minimal effort it takes to use a DMS is nothing when you weigh it against the time spent daily by each staff member looking for and recreating misfiled and lost data. True, an organization that has identified the need for a DMS will only succeed in implementing it if the users are committed to using it. That will only happen if the users also see the benefits and are willing to put in a little extra effort to make it work. Management should be upfront with their staff when considering a DMS. They need to have staff involved in the decision making process so that when they collectively decide to move forward, they also collectively have the desire to make it succeed.
Q: Finally, what do you see as future trends in document management?
A: I think the division line between organizations and project teams will continue to blur, as will the differentiation between document, communication, and content management. Facilitating collaboration between groups will be the major focus for technology, with document management becoming a natural prerequisite. As such, the internet’s role will be re-established as a medium rather than a place. As we move to share all our data through web based technologies, there can’t be a single place to store it all, because it will become too large and unmanageable. Rather, I see new technologies leveraging the power of the internet yet keeping the data and databases fully distributed. It will be much like what Napster created with music sharing, except that businesses will care where the files came from and who can access them.
