8 Things Small Businesses Need to Know about Document Management

Our guest opinion-maker today is Dan Antion, Vice President of Information Services for American Nuclear Insurers. Dan is responsible for information technology at ANI and works with a small team addressing ECM.  (The opinions in this piece are Dan's, not ANI's.) Dan has presented at the AIIM Expo during each of the past four years, three times talking about SharePoint and once talking about working with a small budget. He has completed AIIM's ECM Master course. His blog can be found at http://www.SharePointStories.com.  He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected] and can also be found on LinkedIn and Twitter.

This post is now part of an e-book!  To get a free copy (no charge and no reg required!) go to 8 reasons you need a strategy to manage information.  Here is also the direct link...www.aiim.org/8things. 

Small businesses interested in getting educated about content and document management should also take a look at the "AIIM Essentials" short courses.

This post is part of an ongoing guest blog series around the overall theme of "8 things."  The idea is to tap into the collective experience of members/readers on topics that they are passionate about.  (But related to information, documents, content, or records!).  Click HERE for a full list of topics that we've covered.  Got an idea you want to pitch for an "8 Things" column?  Pitch me at [email protected].

8 Things Small Businesses Need to Know about Document Management

1.  You are not too small for Document Management (DM).

Size doesn’t matter, the junk drawer in your kitchen is just as big a headache as the pile of boxes in your garage. Not addressing document management means you are likely to fail at some point to find the right information for the job. It also means you might be paying to keep information you no longer need. If you’re big enough to get sued, you’re big enough to be forced into e-discovery. If you plan to stay in business you are going to have new employees at some point. DM addresses all these issues.

2.  DM offers value beyond the obvious.

Even small businesses can save money by reducing the cost of document storage. Beyond saving money, effective document management can improve the timeliness of your responses to your customers. DM can also improve the quality of those responses. Both of these benefits can help distinguish you from your competition. DM also improves knowledge transfer to new workers, aids in cross-training and reduces the cost of researching problems. These things make your operation more effective allowing you to absorb more business volume into your existing staff.

3.  DM is not a technology project.

Technical solutions may make the task of managing documents easier but technology doesn’t drive the bus and it doesn’t own the road. DM requires that a company consider what documents you have, who need access, in what form and through what channel will they want that access to flow. You also have to address how long documents should be kept. Those answers should come from the owners and users of information and the people familiar with the regulations affecting your company.  These answers then help form the requirements of the technology solutions.

4.  Management support is required.

In order to overcome “... but we have always done <whatever> this way”, you are going to need management support. To get management support you need to know what you are asking of the company and you need to explain what DM has to offer. If you are in management, you need to look beyond your department and consider the needs of others.

5.  DM includes costs that are not obvious.

You may end up saving money, improving response time and accuracy but DM isn’t free. You may have to invest in technology to support DM, you should plan to invest in training. You may decide to backfill some content that is currently in a difficult to manage form – this may involve scanning or conversion. Once you bring documents under a management regimen, you are going to have things to maintain, things to back up and things to migrate from one generation to the next.

6.  DM technology doesn’t have to be expensive.

There are free and Open Source document management platforms available. Microsoft SharePoint (our choice) is not free but it’s not prohibitively expensive and offers many benefits beyond DM. You can put DM in the Cloud if you’re comfortable with the service provider. You could probably even implement DM practices within traditional file sharing technologies but I wouldn’t want to try.

7.  Education is important and available.

More than anything, when you implement DM, you are changing behavior. You are going to be asking people to spend extra time and put forth extra effort, primarily for the benefit of others. Consider the time involved with proper classification of documents and the addition of metadata. If I wrote a document, I might argue that I don’t need either of those. But, if I want my coworkers to be able to find my document, both are essential. People have to be trained to understand the benefit of these actions and they have to be trained in how to perform those tasks in order to achieve the benefits.

Education is available from many sources and much of it is free. There are tons of forums on LinkedIn, there are Blogs on AIIM’s web site and the web sites of companies involved in this industry, there are digital magazines and e-Newsletters specializing on every nuance of document management. Depending on the scope of your project, you may also want to consider fee-based education. I can honestly say that attending AIIM’s ECM Master Course was the best decision I’ve made many in years. DM can require a long-term effort and having someone on your team that knows where to go and what to do is critical.

8.  All vendors are not created equal. 

If you need outside help, give careful consideration to the vendor you connect with. You must make sure the people you are working with understand the technology you will be using and the goals you have for the implementation. They should be familiar with DM projects and they should be able to point to past success and qualifications in the field of DM. Again, you may need a vendor that isn’t associated with the technology but understands DM or Content Management and help get your company moving in the right direction.

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This post is part of an ongoing guest blog series around the overall theme of "8 things."  The idea is to tap into the collective experience of members/readers on topics that they are passionate about.  (But related to information, documents, content, or records!).  Click HERE for a full list of topics that we've covered.

Comments

[Danny]

Great post Dan.

I felt the 8 things you chose to address were on point and very informative. Thanks.

[document management]

This is a first class article on document management - and you are absolutely right - all vendors are not created equal.

[id scanner]

Great Post. Thank you Dan ! Document Management is one of essential thing for managing either small or big business. We must be perfect in it for running any business successfully.

[KC Truby]

We discovered that going paperless and then using the document work flow that goes along with it. Allowed us to cut our back office tasking by 50%. We use Delegation Magic and for $200 a month they totally run our paper 24/7 in the back ground - it was the best decision we ever made. Because now we can delegate a lot of small tasks out of the office. You should look into Delegation Magic.

[Carlene Schnitzer]

Document management is important for all kinds of businesses. A thorough safe keeping of all documents is essential for the well-being of the company. Soft copies must be stored in secured servers while hard copies must have backups in steel cabinets. Archiving saves time and money, both vital in running a business.