Why is Document Management so important?

Did you know that many organisations do a better job managing and securing their office supplies than they do their business-critical documents?

It’s true. The electronic documents that are the very lifeblood of the modern organisation are all too often taken totally for granted.

Very few businesses take the time to consider the expenses that they incur on a daily basis because of:

Time and effort wasted in locating documents. Recent research has indicated that nearly 10% of an average office worker’s day is spent trying to locate existing information and documents.

Redundant effort necessitated because it’s often easier to recreate something than it would be to try to find it.

Time and effort involved in figuring out who has the latest version of a document, and recovering when various revisions overwrite each other.

Unnecessary usage of network storage devices and network bandwidth, because the documents are dispersed everywhere across the enterprise, rather than centralised.

Likewise, few businesses take the time to consider the considerable risks that they expose themselves to on a daily basis because:

Security is applied haphazardly at best, which exposes important information to scrutiny by potentially inappropriate people.

Critical documents are stored — often exclusively — on laptop computers that could be lost, stolen, or damaged at any time.

Documents stored centrally on Windows network drives, once deleted, do not go into a recycle bin as commonly believed. They simply disappear, and must be restored slowly from tape backups (if you’re lucky enough to have those).

No record exists of precisely who has viewed and/or edited a document. It is therefore impossible to audit a business process to uncover mistakes or inefficiencies.