The quick wins in document management and document collaboration

Long time since an update at the ECMSignals. I have been attending a week of accelerated learning at Capgeminis University at Les Fountaines. A trilling experience, but I’m now back to the reality of using the learning experiences in a real environment.

In this blogspot I would like to share some reflections regarding document management and document collaboration. This is a field where organisations can gain huge improvements and strong return on investments. Implementing solutions in this is segment organisations will discover a magnitude of quick wins.

The As-Is situation in document collaboration
In 90% of organisations the employees uses Microsoft Word to collaborate on documents. They use Words “powerful” :-) built-in collaboration features, and after a few edit rounds the documents become unwieldy to read. Reviewers then have to send an email explaining why they made a certain change, along with comments made inline in the document. By the end of the process you have 19 versions of the same file from 6 different people and 90 emails discussing the content. The document is then stored on a file server (the L: drive) with the file name as the only identifier. Example of such a collaborative filename is: “custproject_final_19_PCD.doc”. This is madness and the organisations need to take actions to control and improve the situation.

Together with my status description (As-Is) on document collaboration I also read a report published by the Butler Group that states that employees spend up to 25% of their working day on non-productive, document collaboration related tasks. The report goes on to say that organisations risk a great deal more that poor business performance by not managing the collaboration, production and lifecycle of documents, and time has come to move from intra-company collaboration to more sophisticated inter-company collaboration.

Business managers need to seek out new means how the most expensive of all corporate assets – the information worker - can be more efficient, effective and productive. The key enabler in this quest is the interaction between information and people, so by relating to Butler Group that knowledge workers (the most expensive one) uses up to 25% of the time at non productive activities a quick win should be to implement a document and collaboration system.

Is Document Management on the agenda?
To illustrate this I refer to a recent Forrester report that asked 1,017 software decision-makers from North American and European enterprise companies about their ECM plans, and the results are overwhelming:

• Nearly 75% of organisations will invest in document management in 2008
• Nearly 65% of organisations will invest in team collaboration software in 2008
• Microsoft leads all vendors by a large margin with nearly 25% of organizations planning to invest in Microsoft’s technology for ECM

The future
Microsoft looks set to dominate this battle with the ECM vendors in order to become the leading Document Collaboration platform provider of choice, and Microsoft will integrate all office applications into one platform - MOSS. But there are new Web-based technologies and companies (google.com and zoho.com) that will force Microsoft and other ECM vendors to re-think their strategies over the coming year. For more indepth information please read my blog post regarding My personal view on the Microsoft Yahoo acquisition