On our journey towards creating the best solution for records management, we have interviewed more than 100 companies to try to understand why information management is so hard. What are their main challenges and how can we solve them? Based on these talks we discovered a common set of challenges, and even though the companies varied in size and industry, it turned out they faced the same problems.
So, what are the challenges?
In summary we observed three reasons why the organization of documents often ends up in chaos, and staff not finding the documentation they need.
Changes, both in terms of people and processes. Documentation is often structured in a way that makes sense at the time, but with time and as new people join, it gets out of control. As time passes you find yourself in a state of classification backlog. The folders and categories that once made sense, expand and change according to the immediate needs of the business. Your documentation is missing valuable information and tags that can make them useful and possible to find and reuse. Your structure becomes inconsistent over time.
Tools are too complicated
Enterprise tools for documentation are often too complicated, and employees end up using them wrongly, or altogether avoiding them.
Folders
One of the main reasons documents go missing is because of folders. Folders are so commonly used that people take them for granted. But they are not a good way of organizing documentation. There are many reasons for this. One being that anyone can add a folder at any time.
The result is that over time an organization will have thousands of folders that do not make sense and adds chaos. Many files end up in different folders. Where is the latest presentation? Is it in the Sales folder, in the Presentation folder, or maybe I put it in the Customer folder? This is because the folder structure is limited to one dimension. You can only choose one folder for your document.
