Nobody would say it’s a good idea to take all of your important business information and just make a big pile in the corner.
But inefficient document systems are much like landfills: Everything gets dumped into one place, without meaningful organization or metadata. As a result, it’s difficult to find and retrieve a document once it goes into that repository.
This approach creates inefficiencies for any company that uses a lot of documents. But it’s a serious problem for professional services firms, since these organizations tend to have document-heavy processes and deliverables.
The good news is that these firms have an opportunity to significantly increase efficiency by rethinking how they approach document sharing.
Some characteristics of an efficient document sharing system include:
- System facilitates easy organization of the document library
- Easy to apply metadata and content types to documents
- Uses document information to organize views of the library
- Robust, localized enterprise search capabilities
By moving to such a system, professional services organizations gain three important benefits:
- Improved efficiency: When your employees are able to find the information they need, when they need it, you save enormous amounts of time that would otherwise be spent duplicating previous efforts or creating a new document from scratch.Being able to find, reuse and modify existing documents is particularly valuable in professional services firms. Any time you avoid re-creating a document, it saves you time – an hour, two hours or more. That quickly adds up to an enormous efficiency gain.
- Consistent quality and branding: Using a good document sharing system also helps reduce risks. When everyone is accessing the same templates and knowledge assets via a centralized document library, it supports consistency in your work products, processes and brand.For example, when employees are using preapproved templates, rather than always creating documents from scratch, you avoid inadvertent errors and reduce the chance of sending unapproved documents.
- Streamlined real-time collaboration: On the most basic level, document sharing consists of taking a document you’re working on and moving it from your desktop, where it’s isolated, into a SharePoint site, where it’s domain of your organization. When you use document sharing in a collaborative context, it opens new opportunities for co-authoring, but also introduces a new set of challenges and risks.One challenge with co-authoring is that you have multiple versions of a single document floating around your organization. Without some form of version control, it’s hard to know which file is the current version, and often impossible to get a consolidated view of all changes that have been made to the document.As a result, it’s easy for an employee to accidently send a document that did not have final review because they grabbed the second-to-last version from their email box instead of the final version.A good document-sharing platform reduces these risks and streamlines real-time collaboration, which is especially helpful in complex tasks like creating proposals. Eliminating inefficiencies in your proposal process allows your employees to invest that time in creativity, differentiation and ensuring high-quality output.
In the past, professional services firms have found it difficult to move information from email accounts and desktops into these centralized document-sharing systems. If your company is rethinking your system, focusing on user experience is a good way to improve efficiency.
To capture the benefits of a good document management system, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to get these documents off their desktops and into a location where they’re accessible to others in the organization, such as simple drag-and-drop functionality and automated syncing with document libraries.
