In the past, storage and scalability posed significant obstacles in document management, but now the big problem is often poor information design.
Companies may put a lot of effort into the technical design and user interface design aspects of SharePoint development, but often underestimate the importance of information design in the platform’s overall usability.
In a sense, this is a good problem to have. Until recently, document management tended to run into technical limitations of data storage and scalability. But for companies that use Office 365 those technical limitations simply don’t exist anymore. The platform includes SharePoint Online (which solves scalability issues) and OneDrive for Business (which offers one terabyte of storage per user).
Now, the real challenge in document management isn’t storing information, but finding it. That’s why it’s critical to implement an information architecture that improves findability and enterprise search.
You could think of information architecture as making a sitemap and applying it to your entire company. It sets out the different departments and units, projects and processes, describing them in the terms you use internally. These sets of terms are then available across your document management system. Any time you upload a document in SharePoint, applying metadata either happens automatically, or by using dropdown lists.
Applying metadata consistently makes your documents much easier to find in the future, no matter where you store the actual file. The old file-share approach used folders typically lacking any metadata, and often the only person who could find a file was the person who put it in the folder.
From an implementation perspective, it’s important to invest time up front on information design. Many people don’t truly understand the need for it and simply push SharePoint out to users without it. Essentially, that’s the equivalent of just taking a file share and putting it online — you miss out on opportunities to make your content much more findable and searchable. It takes some discipline to first think through how to make metadata and information architecture work for your organization.
From a user adoption perspective, getting widespread buy-in for your document management system definitely requires an awareness process. For users to apply and use metadata, they need understand how it is done and why it is important.
That’s also true of other complementary SharePoint features, such as tagging and coauthoring. With coauthoring, for example, one of the biggest impediments is that people don’t understand how versioning works. As a result, they’re uncomfortable with uploading files to a SharePoint site and enabling coauthoring, even though this feature would be advantageous for the individual and their teams.
In the end, carefully planned and implemented information architecture is crucial to maintaining an effective document management system. As your organization grows, moving into new lines of business or acquiring other companies, taking time now to improve findability and search should pay dividends.
Learn more about helping your organization leverage today’s enterprise content management tools by contacting Portal Solutions.
