Paperless Office is “All talk - no Action” – Part 2

Part 1 is at:
http://www.filehold.com/resources/whitepapers/paperless-office

Attention Business Managers - Why are you afraid to mandate new ways of doing things in your company to protect intellectual Property? 

Your organization mandates; building security policies, expense policies, HR practices and other business processes to keep your physical and intellectual property safe. You probably have a locked file room or at least locked file cabinets and desk drawers to store confidential and proprietary paper based information. Then why do you allow employees to keep electronic data on their unsecure, at risk, desktops and laptops? Why do you allow private electronic file shares in departments with questionable security practices subject to vandalism and employee sabotage? Why is it; management will not mandate work process that centralize the storage of electronic information to ensure the security of electronic documents and, incidentally, lead to significant financial benefits?

FileHold Systems Inc. gets daily requests about document and file management related business problems from organizations:

• We need to get rid of file cabinets to create floor space!
  
  
• We are worried about an unstructured, unsecure file share!
  
  
• We need version control to reduce duplication of effort!
  
  
• We want to make compliance reporting for audits fast and easy!
  
  
• We can’t find internal information. We want Google type search!
  
  
• We want an electronic Review and Approval process for collaboration!
  
  
• We want mobile workers to have access to electronic information!
  
  
• We need to protect intellectual property as a part of our business continuity plan!
  
  

Every one of these problems (and many more) can be solved with an electronic document management system (EDMS). These companies engage with us; they ask many questions, read web content, watch product demonstrations, review features, and confirm IT capabilities and budgets. They spend lots of time and money on this evaluation process and some even take the effort to install a trial and train employees on the system. Time goes by and it is discovered that the technology works perfectly; it is easy to use and solves the business problems and it is affordable. So it should be an easy decision to proceed but it isn’t. There is resistance from some employees (often important engineers or legal workers and even management) who do not want to change their entrenched business practices of storing document s and important e-mail on their own desktop. They refuse to comply by saying the systems is too hard to use and they fight process change. In the spirit of employee relations Management allows them to do so and in most cases the project is put on hold or “back burnered” for some other priority. Time and money has been wasted doing this evaluation, the solution is at hand but management will not impose a slight change in work processes that will ensure the protection of intellectual property. 

If you want to protect your intellectual property and if you want to go Paperless you must mandate a solution in your organization. Employee adoption of document management technology is the biggest reason for system failure or in many cases the reason why the software is not even purchased after being evaluated.  A centralized document control system and electronic workflow pays off by reducing the cost of paper mailing and storage, keeps organizations in compliance and protects intellectual property.  Unfortunately these are not objectives lower level employees, or even some executives, care about very much for their organization.  If given a choice employees prefer to keep their information proprietary, on their own desktop and in their own control as opposed to taking the extra step to store or retrieve documents from a central repository and collaborate electronically.  Once in place employees willingly adopt document management software as a departmental solution but in general there is resistance by the average employee and some managers to any business process regimentation and process change. Employees like routine and a “comfort zone”. Electronic workflow will save an AP department time to get invoices approved and paid; an electronic forms feature will make HR life in capturing employee review forms at the same time protecting information and saving money. 

The point of this is that what is needed is a mandate from management for all employees to use the system to secure your intellectual property for business continuity and make the usage a condition of employment.  Document management software is not hard to use and only requires a few extra keystrokes to store documents in an organized way.  The big productivity gains come when searching, version controlling, sharing and auditing documents in your business – you cannot get these benefits until the system is used. We have customers who reduce the time it takes to gather materials for annual audits from weeks to hours because they have mandated the use of the systems by everyone. Managers; go out and mandate the use of this technology, after a short period your employees will embrace it and the downstream payoffs are substantial. It is your electronic Intellectual property and you are responsibility is to protect it in the same way you secure your physical assets.