Is information flow in your company as good as you think it is?

Searching files can be really fun if you have your files at your finger tips. If you ever faced the problem, when you remember you have information you somewhere on your hard disk, but you cannot get it on time. It's common problem today. People are creating more and more documents and it's important to be able to find necessary information quickly.

Let's think why we face this problem? There are several reasons. The first is about growth. Electronic documents workflow growth every day, month and year. It's a well-know estimation, that the average number of managed documents growth by 10% every year. We are getting too many documents to manage!

Second, you have a lot of documents and it is true. But also the trust is that you might have a various versions of the same document, you might have some documents that got old, some documents should have some state, such as approved or pending approval.

Third, some of your documents are actually hidden behind a database, file formats that are not easy searchable, files that are not searchable at all. It's way a good idea to scan all documents and fill them into a database of scanned documents. When filling these documents user supposed to put some keywords and descriptions, but this meta information won't do it's job if you need to browse thousand of documents.

What to do about this? Are there any possible solutions? Sure, and it's very important to invest into the right database management tool or search tool.

Let's have a small check list for the document management system you are using now: if it allows to do a document search by certain keywords (sure it does!), but it is allows to build a search queerly using a regular expressions, some syntax such as not, or, and expressions. Again, I'm sure it does. But if it allows to search database using synonymic expressions? If is can search text which is included as a meta information into some diagram or chart file format?

How the process of document management is organized? Can the user fill in the document without putting a comments, keywords and description texts? No? But if the keywords and descriptions are good enough? Have someone explained employees how to write these comments so that they would be useful? If someone do a quality control job for this - if someone do a check up of passed comments and correct their authors? Sure, all these actions require some time, but it's a great investment into the future business performance.

People are willing to believe that information is critical for business success, but what they do to make information working for them? There is a good test to find out if there are some problems with information management in your company. Few more questions - if this week you had to retype something you already written before? If someone ask your advice, as he or she couldn't find something? If you fill you spent too much time searching document you need?

People should feel free about information management, the task of business managers is to provide a way to manage information properly, bring it to right hard on a right time.