Well done, you’ve finally done it, and what a hard job it was…! Convincing management and the whole company of the benefit of shutting down access to the file system, changing the pace of the users and re-educating them, among other things.
Nobody said it would be easy, did they? But you’re there, at that point where the system is stable and the users have learned how cool it is to finally find something when they need it or to know exactly what happened to invoice X and why it wasn’t paid on time. You should get a medal, believe me. I’ve been doing this for over 10 years and I’ve seen a lot. I’ve seen what it costs and I’ve heard many users tell me bitterly about the amount of money and frustration they’ve had to invest in their document management projects. But you and your users are living proof that it can be done, and now you can go to bed every night with peace of mind because you know that no one is going to delete I don’t know how many hundreds of documents from the file system any day now.
After giving you my sincere congratulations for the titanic work you have done, I have to give you some bad news: your work does not end here.
Although you can take a break now, you should know that life goes on and the needs don’t end… never! But that’s a good thing, because it means we are still needed. 🤗
But seriously, what comes next?
In this day and age, with the mobility that exists and the characteristics of the labour market for technical positions, it is quite common to face a high turnover of technical staff. If our business sector is volatile, or we belong to a multinational, we may also have to deal with acquisitions, migrations, internal policies/decisions and other situations that have a direct impact on the management of the company’s digital assets and on the staff in charge of the governance of the content or document management platform. It is our responsibility to ensure that, as time goes by, people change, solution design changes, new software functionalities, changes in data volumes and qualities, all information about the design and maintenance of the system is kept within the IT and document and business management team. It is therefore important to appoint individuals or teams directly responsible for digital documents and content at the technical and business level. These individuals should ensure that the information can be passed on to their successors.
It is our responsibility to ensure that as time goes by, people change, solution design changes, [...etc], document management system design and maintenance information is maintained across IT, document management and business teams.
Everything in life changes. Business processes are not static and, in fact, the health of your company depends a lot on your organisation’s ability to adapt quickly. If you have chosen a good content management platform, you will be able to make adjustments to configurations and customisations according to user feedback, as well as to changes in processes. On the other hand, the trend will probably be to grow in data and users over time, so keeping an eye on the health of the system will also be an important task. Your mission is to ensure that the platform does not become too small at any time.
Don’t forget that documents are ultimately the result of business processes. This means that we should see document management not only as the organised and secure storage of documents, but as the result of processes that need to be optimised. Your digital content management platform is a tool to achieve this optimisation. Now that many users in the company already know and use the platform, it’s time to sit down with them and ask them what inefficiencies they see in their processes, what hurts them in their day-to-day work. You already have internal champions and testimonials of success, now it will be easier for you to continue improving processes and extending the use of the platform. Also pay attention to those processes that have a direct impact on customers, because they usually bring an important and clear benefit to the business.
These are 3 key points that come to mind, but I could go on and on: establishing retention policies to ensure that the system does not store more than it should over time, among other things.
Anyway, as you can see, the work has just begun. 😃 But don’t let up, Mon ami, because the reward doesn’t stop either. The gratitude of the users every time you incorporate an improvement in their processes, the peace of mind of knowing that if someone leaves the team, the person who comes in will have a controlled transfer of knowledge and the knowledge that the data is safe and accessible, is more than a reward.
AthentoAcelera 2023: la primera conferencia online y abierta de Athento se celebrará los días 23, 24, 25 y 26 de Octubre ¡inscríbete ahora!
Ya puedes ver el vídeo del webinar: Canal de Denuncias Interno con Athento, del pasado 14 de septiembre de 2023.
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