Redefining Document Production Process

What is and should be the most important question for all document-centric industries? Improving the document production process.

Information workers waste 21.3% of an organization's total productivity

A white paper published by IDC, estimates that information workers waste 21.3% of an organization's total productivity. In monetary terms, this equals a whopping $19,732 / year per knowledge worker. This is a massive loss to any organization, which is often known, but not acted upon. Information workers need solutions that enables them to improve the document production process.

Two of the core findings of the IDC report, is that knowledge workers needs to be more efficient creating and managing documents, and collaborating around documents. The challenge is that many organizations are limited by the deficits and challenges inherent with file based document solutions.

One core contributor to data loss is file sharing

To enable multiple contributors in a file driven solution, you generally need to break your document into several smaller files to enable collaboration, making the document production process significantly harder to manage. Not only does a file driven document solution (such as Word) increase the silo effect, but it also creates challenges with formatting, versioning, revisions and more. Not to mention the security aspect of using a file driven solution. According to Checkpoint's Security Report for 2015, loss of proprietary information has increased 71% over the past three years. Organizations experienced an average of 12.7 high-risk application events per hour, or about 305 times per day - and one core contributor to this data loss is file sharing programs.

A database driven document solution can be a key part of reducing the information workers waste in creating, managing and collaborating on documents. How?

• A database driven document solution can easily provide a single-source of content across your enterprise. This enables both composite document management (CDM) and master content management (MCM), which can greatly reduce the inefficiencies inherent with reusing information as with a file based solution.

Often information workers need to navigate to a myriad of file-based solutions to create, automate, assemble, format and review documents. With a database driven document solution this is all part of the package. Just these elements greatly reduces the amount of time information workers waste. However, the core challenge is generally the complete process from start to finish. There are many challenges that need to be overcome.

Serial vs. parallel document production process

A file driven document solution built on or around word typically provides the knowledge worker with a serial process, where one keeps waiting for someone else or one works in silos. The reason being that the document is often broken down into fragments to enable more than one person working on the document.

A database driven document solution provides the ability to streamline this process and work in parallel. A parallel process can provide enormous time savings when producing documents in combination with other contributors. The following figure gives an overview of the serial vs. parallel process.

By introducing a smarter document production process for your knowledge workers, whether they work locally, globally or virtually - you can be more efficient, work more securely and increase quality.