If you own a smartphone, you know the importance of tailoring it to suit you. Out of the box, it is a thing of beauty. But the value comes when you add your contacts, sign-into your Facebook account, connect to your email, and synchronize your music.
The same is true for business tools. The value is maximized when you customize a solution to suit how your business operates. In the world of document management, that means adding your own workflows to control how documents are reviewed and approved. And it means customizing how you organize documents – by geography, business unit, product, or other element.
Document Management Templates
Today KnowledgeTree made that easier. When companies sign-up for a free trial, they can select a pre-built template. These templates provide frameworks specifically designed for Legal and Finance teams. Based on interviews with our customers, these templates give Legal and Finance users a solid base for organizing their documents.
But starting points are just that, a start. As with all workflows and metadata in KnowledgeTree, teams can adjust and refine the structures to match their own internal models. And as always, no developers are required to customize KnowledgeTree to suit your business.
This week we published the results of a major survey that looked into how teams collaborate at work and the connection to document management. Among the key findings were:
94% of important business documents are collaborated on
But 79% found the collaboration process to be frustrating
Why? The bulk of teams that collaborated did so via email
Not great results for teams that work with email. Collaboration as a concept encourages optimal outcomes from teams by taking what is best from each member – the whole being greater than the sum. But collaboration is prone to significant friction. How? Let’s look at the example of a sales team working on a new proposal.
The pursuit team builds a draft proposal using existing content. That draft is emailed to the 10 members of the pursuit team. Each member makes minor modifications to it. Some email the author with changes embedded in the document. Others paste changes in an email. The result is chaos, frustration, and lost feedback.
The chaos only multiplies as collaboration continues. A new round of changes is added to the sales proposal being developed. Did it include all of the first set of changes? Which version should I start reviewing? Has it been reviewed by the right people? The returns generated by increased collaboration diminish rapidly with each step in the process.
We all work in teams. Sales teams get input from marketing on a proposal. Legal finalizes contracts for finance. And management approves offer letters for HR. In fact, 94% of all documents are worked on as part of a team process.
But for most people, the teamwork process is a painful one. We surveyed 1,400 professionals around the world to find out what the causes were and how to address the pain. And we put the results into the handy infographic you’ll find below.
What were the big conclusions?
No professional is an island. But teamwork is frustrating.
Virtually every process depends on documents and almost all are built by teams. But 79% found the collaboration process to be frustrating.
The collaboration process is broken, and email is the culprit.
For 59% of teams, new versions and feedback are shared via email. That means that when you send a draft to 10 people looking for feedback, you’ll likely receive 10 replies with 10 attachments and 10 sets of different feedback spread across those attachments.
Collaboration needs process. But processes are inefficient.
61% of business documents are approved via email. And since most documents require 3 or more people to approve them, this can add up to lots of email approvals when you have dozens of documents. That means that 61% of the time it is difficult for team members to determine whether a document has truly been authorized. That leads to more delays.
The Goldilocks Principle applies well to the business world. Too often we opt for extremes, when the answer is somewhere in the middle.
This certainly holds true when it comes to business processes. Core actions like approving a budget, authorizing a contract, or validating a sales proposal often fall into one of two camps. First, they depend on rigid processes with limited opportunity for collaboration. Or, they are vetted via free-form collaboration without a defined end-point or conclusion.
Highly structured processes often make sense for highly regulated environments or where there is a large risk of loss for missed approvals. But in most cases, this rigidity sacrifices productivity and the ability to adapt quickly.
On the flipside are collaborative processes without an end-point. If approval processes are essentially composed of “keeping everyone in the loop” or gathering feedback, then there will often never be closure to a process. That may work for brainstorming documents, but seldom for more common business documents.
After all, they are business documents. You need to control who can access, contribute to, and authorize a document.
Over the last few weeks we have run a survey on document management and collaboration. The response has been more than enthusiastic. Thank you to all that completed the survey -- we had nearly 1,500 responses. One element of the survey was a drawing for a Nexus 7. The drawing was made using a random number generator and the winner, Paul from the United States, was alerted. Thank you again for your participation, and we'll be releasing the results of the survey in the coming weeks.
A key attribute that CRN looked for when presenting the award was the degree to which value-add can be delivered via tools. What does that mean? It means that no two businesses are identical. Each has their own way of working across teams, organizing its information, and managing business processes. So, it is only natural that tools that support them must be configurable.
There are a few ways that we see that reflected in the reality of document management. Let’s see:
Making Teamwork Work
Every major business action is built around teamwork. Teams share ideas, provide feedback, and offer help. But when ideas are passing back and forth via email, or when feedback is buried within a forgotten spreadsheet, or when useful content is produced and forgotten, well, teamwork breaks down. Tools need to adapt to or improve existing ways of getting work done. In either case, they need to be customizable.
Our new Web Documents technology has already generated a lot of interest from users. And it’s no surprise. The tool lets users collaborate around the creation of documents – in real-time and in the cloud. As you’ve seen from previous videos, there are a number of great collaboration features that let you co-author documents that you’re working on and “rewind” changes quickly.
We’ve seen a lot of interest from legal teams working on sections within a contract or legal agreement. And we’ve seen teams working on proposals being able to create new content, collaborate on it, and drop it back into the master document they’re working on.
Document Management Means Control
One thing to remember is that an important part of document management is the management side. That is, being able to not just create and share a document, but also to manage it through its lifecycle. After all, if you’re making content that is worth making, it ought to be reviewed and reused by the right colleagues in your organization.
That’s why Web Documents is such a powerful tool for document management. Any document you create in the online editor in KnowledgeTree is treated like a standard document under your control. That means you can add metadata and use workflows. For the above legal document scenario, what does that mean?
Web Documents has been out for more than a week, and the response from customers has been terrific. Just yesterday, the team ran a webinar where we walked through how document management is radically simplified by the “structured collaboration” approach that Web Documents provides. It lets you:
Create a document in the cloud and instantly share it with colleagues
Edit and co-author the document in real-time to see changes as they happen
Rewind changes to see how a document was altered over time
Publish a document and then manage it with metadata and workflows, like any other document in KnowledgeTree
But there’s another interesting feature of Web Documents that I wanted to draw your attention to. Imagine you are working on a new sales proposal. The proposal contains a whole series of documents: budgets for the proposal, marketing collateral, sales data, legal contracts, and more. And the proposal’s various documents are developed by a multi-organization pursuit team.
KnowledgeTree wants to make it simple to create documents as a team. Our new Web Documents tool lets teams collaboratively create and edit documents together in real-time. And you can structure the organization and approval of your documents with KnowledgeTree’s enterprise-class document management tools.
You can try the tools for yourself by starting a free trial of the online document management system. That’s always the best way to understand how a product can help your business. And please read on for a tour of the primary features.
Create a New Document
As you’d demand of a cloud-based document management solution, you can easily drag and drop Excel, Word, PowerPoint, PDF, and other documents into your vault. But how many times have you created a document that you needed the feedback of colleagues? We see it all the time for legal, finance, and sales groups. These are teams that work on contracts, proposals, and other documents and depend on input from often distributed organizations.
KnowledgeTree wants to make collaboration simple and structured. Have you ever worked with a team on a new proposal or agreement? If so, you know the pain of emailing a document to 10 people, getting 10 replies with 10 attachments, and 10 sets of comments embedded within.
That’s not a recipe for efficient collaboration. Collaboration should be simple, letting teams focus on the business of getting new contracts, agreements, and other documents built.
And if you’ve ever worked together to create a document that was abandoned or went unapproved, then you know the pain of unstructured collaboration. Collaboration shouldn’t be for the purpose of creating forgotten documents. It must be in the context of the business processes you have as an organization.
Today KnowledgeTree announced Web Documents. This new capability lets users create documents like a team with simple to use co-authoring features. And it lets users manage those documents like a business, controlling how co-authored documents are organized and managed.
Co-Author Documents
You can create a new document in your browser and immediately start adding content. You can invite colleagues to view and edit the document, and their changes appear in real-time. You can even chat with co-workers to improve the quality of your content. Combined with KnowledgeTree’s rich set of collaborative document management features, like comments, version control, and more, you can work with global teams to create great documents.
