Why Document Management Will Fail In Your Company

September 9, 2008 · Filed Under Business, Culture, EDM 

Why Document Management (DMS) will fail in your company You are one of the many businesses, small and large, in varying phases of deployment of a document management solution (DMS). Investments have been made financially, in personnel to keep the project moving, and in training to ensure some level of adoption. Now your boss comes to you and asks how the project is going?

Of course you think it’s going well. It’s on auto-pilot, right? You built it into the business workflow and things are getting scanned in? That’s the picture of success right?

Sadly, there is not a finish line to success. Sure basic project management training will tell us to set and achieve milestones of success, but success is a journey and not a destination. We often fall victim in the trap of justifying success based upon levels of acceptance and adoption far too low - simply to appease our own egos, ease our conscience, or simply justify our job.

Document management can be extremely complex unless you have:

  1. A very firm grasp on your business process,
  2. how to apply technology in order to automate processes, and
  3. a keen perception of your company’s culture.

My company has been working with DMS for a number of years now, and even in a small company like ours, I am constantly amazed at how easily an initiative can be derailed without an executive level sponsor who both drives the initiative and lobbies for success.

You as the project leader, or business unit leader, must be a strong champion of the solution and constantly beat the drum of applying the solution to solve business challenges. Don’t force a square peg into a round hole, but look for innovative ways to apply the technology and get the true bang for your buck!

Furthermore, you as the champion cannot drive the offering into each nook and cranny in your business. You must rely on departmental leadership to come to your call. This is where it is essential to have buy-in from all unit leaders, and this - perhaps - can be one of the most challenging portions of just about any project rollout, especially one like document management that hasn’t quite crossed into the realm of infrastructure like e-mail and line of business applications.

Without understanding and acting upon these key functions of your document management project, your solution will never take root in your organization, and ultimately will fail.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

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    Comments

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      • ^
      • v
      Well - indeed.

      Try this one:

      A selling professional works 6 months on a solution for an account. From day one, the monthly cost of the solution was 100% of the cost the company was incurring in 8-part, pre-printed forms. Day one. This was the easiest calculation to make, had the most significance, and should have been enough for the company to jump in with both legs.

      There is more -

      By having Picking tickets print in the inventory control department instead of them being generated in accounting and "walked" out back, the number of lost orders would be reduced to 0 - when one order is lost a month (unbelievably, this was a fact) the costs associate with this occurrence reached into the tens of thousands of dollars - each time.

      After an unbelievable amount of negotiations the deal was signed and the project launched - and as you can guess, the nightmare began...3 years later, the solution is still not fully implemented.

      Many lessons learned.

      I have a saying, "An EDM solution is like a magnifying glass - it makes the good thing better and the bad things worse..."
      • ^
      • v
      Greg, I have seen this more times than I can count. Your statement about DM solutions being a magnifying glass was a lesson we ourselves learned 12 months after we launched our internal system. It is a great story about how we not only ate our own dog food, used a solution we sell on ourselves, but learned that software doesn't SOLVE problems it only automates them.

      I have found that I a few solid mentors I have learned from (one being the school of hard knocks) that you ask, "Why?" (A LOT), intimately understand what your business is (what you sell to pay the light bill), understand why you chose the way your information flows, and finally if this all makes sense?

      From there, you can get your arms around the animal of your business - and apply technology to automate the processing bottlenecks and speed processes - not "fix" human or process problems.

      Very well said, Greg.
     

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