HOW

T O

ORGANIZE

FIRST STEPS: ASSESS HOW YOUR TEAM ACCESSES ITS DOCUMENTS With so many documents in your organization it is important to support efficient document retrieval. To do so, you should begin by understanding how team members interact with their documents. This helps you organize documents from the beginning of your document management initiative and support best practices going forward. To manage documents, start by asking questions like: Are there relatively static groupings of documents? You may divide documents by organizational units, like HR or Finance. By establishing a folder structure for these groupings you give users an easily understood way to structure documents. Think carefully about how teams think about document groupings. How are documents used in the organization? Are documents applicable to a certain customer or geography? Do some teams need access to the document? Is there a particular project that the document relates to? Does the document expire on a given date? Metadata is a powerful and convenient way to organize documents. Look at grouping documents based on attributes that make sense to your organization. What are the repeatable processes in your organization? Are there elements that can be standardized? Many organizations have activities that can be converted into templates. For instance, when new customers are signed-up, is there a standard set of information that must be collected? If so, you should determine what templates it makes sense to build to simplify how documents are created and organized.

BUSINESS

DOCUMENTS

ORGANIZE DOCUMENTS TO BOOST PRODUCTIVITY

Every aspect of your business depends on documents. Whether youre in Legal, Sales, Marketing, Finance, or IT, you deal with dozens of documents per week. These budgets, contracts, invoices, proposals, and other documents, support the business processes at the heart of your organization. But with tens of thousands of documents in your company, and many more created, scanned, and added each week, how do you find what you need? How do you know you have the latest version? How can you locate the most relevant piece of content? This paper looks at best practices for organizing your documents to help boost productivity across your teams.

USING FOLDERS TO ORGANIZE DOCUMENTS Folders are among the most intuitive ways to organize content. Users are accustomed to structuring their documents based on a hierarchical format. When beginning the process you should investigate the most logical way to group documents. Is it by department, geography, or document type? Many organizations select business units as a way to begin, but this will depend on your own organizational priorities. An element to investigate when implementing folders is to determine whether business processes can be tied to folders. For instance, a finance organization may place all unapproved invoices in one folder and then move invoices as they are approved into a finalized folder. Or, a legal team may create a folder for unapproved sales contracts. A contract approval workflow can then be associated with the folder so that all new documents added to the folder must go through a defined lifecycle. The document management solutions that you investigate should support the linkage of business process activities with folders and other ways that you organize documents.

ORGANIZING CONTENT
TO M A K E

DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT

SIMPLE

MANAGE ACCESS AND REPEAT PROCESSES Folders also provide a convenient way to manage which individuals have access to a given set of documents. For instance, the legal team may have access to all contracts, while the sales team is only granted access to contracts associated with active clients. The document management tool that you select should allow permissions to be applied at a folder level. Templates give you another way to keep control over your documents. Lets say that you have a highly repeated process, like New Customer On-Boarding. There are likely standard pieces of content that are created each time a new customer arrives. For instance, you may have customer contracts, statements of work, licensing terms, presentations, and proposals. Your document management tool should allow you to create folder template structures so that they can be standardized and reused each time a new customer comes on board.

USE METADATA, TAGS TO FILTER DATA Documents often fit into multiple categories. A legal contract might relate to a particular client, a certain product, and multiple geographic regions. As a result, it is important to make the document easy to retrieve even when it doesnt fit neatly into just one folder. Metadata provides a way to address this need. Metadata are elements that describe a document based on useful concepts. So, you can mark a document as being applicable to a certain geography, customer, and product. These tags allow you to group documents across multiple categories. While metadata can be easily customized going forward, it is helpful to understand how your team will tag its documents and define those groupings early. When investigating a document management technology, it is important to look to tools that go beyond simple text-based tags. You should be able to build and tailor metadata based on picklists, lists, date fields, rich texts whatever best describes your documents and makes them easy to store and retrieve. You should also investigate what metadata to make mandatory. If there are attributes of a document that must be managed, then you should standardize the metadata collected. For instance, review date for a contract may be imperative for your legal team to have in place. At the same time, it should be easy to add metadata. That means that whether you access a document through a browser, mobile device, or a desktop tool, users must be able to easily add and update metadata. And when uploading large volumes of documents, for instance from a scanner or in another bulk operation, it should be easy to add descriptors to your documents.

ORGANIZE

METADATA

USI NG

TO

DOCUMENTS

DOCUMENTS EASE
W I T H

RETRIEVING

SEARCH SMARTER TO UNCOVER USEFUL COLLATERAL Storing documents is only half of the equation. It must also be easy for users to find and retrieve the documents that they need. Hundreds of hours are lost annually by employees struggling to find a needed document. These delays can be very disruptive to your document led business processes. Your document searching mechanism should be able to leverage the work youve done with metadata. That means locating all customer contracts for EMEA with a due date of this year, for example. Because searches are often conducted repeatedly, you should be able to save your configured searches. That allows colleagues to efficiently find the same documents and collaborate more effectively. Plus, your search should recognize text that is hidden within images or scanned documents by using OCR. Searching is a great way to locate a document that you know that you need. But how do you find documents that you dont know that you need? Here analytics can help. Your document management tool should surface the most viewed, commented on, and liked documents. That allows users to identify content that their colleagues find valuable like a new piece of marketing collateral or a financial template for creating budgets.

WHATS NEXT?
Organizing documents must be simple to manage, but powerful enough to support your business processes. Look to solutions that are customizable to your own unique business processes and let you structure your documents with ease.

SMART FOLDERS

SMART SEARCH
T HI S I S T HE

FO LDER TEMP L ATES

DOCUMENT
AN ALY TI C S S M A RT FEEDS

YOU NEED

P ERMIS SIO NS

?
G A M IF IC AT IO N

SMART TAGS
! R EQUI R ED FI EL DS CUST OMIZAB LE META DATA