Overcome The #1 Failing Of Document Management Systems

Picture this:

You have been given a new job. That job has processes for which you are responsible. How do you learn what you need to do down to the finest detail?

“Go to the Document Management System” (DMS), your colleagues intone. “It is our business bible – the font of all knowledge”.

Now, to be fair, I have never come across a DMS that has everything you will ever need to know already in it. However, I’m going to assume that your DMS is somehow magically completely up to date, and that everything you need to know is in there somewhere.

But how do you find what you are looking for? You’d ask the previous person responsible – but they became a movie cliché last week as they were walked from the building carrying a box of stuff. So what do you do? Conduct a word search? Scan through a gargantuan folder structure that was created 10 years ago using descriptors that no longer have any currency? Ask the DMS Librarian where to find it? Or find the DMS evangelists and ask them to coffee?

Most people do all four. Sometimes they hit the jackpot early on, but more often than not, they do not, and getting the information they need to be excellent becomes a grind. In the process, they inevitably hit the DMS wall – the single point of failure for these well-meaning and sometimes beautifully constructed libraries of information:

Lack of Context

An information resource is only as good as its ability to turn that information into usable knowledge. Arguably, all knowledge is usable simply because it exists, and the innovation process is a critical development path of information that may not be instantly usable – but is expected to be over the medium to longer term. However, in today’s fast paced world, if you are not innovating, information only becomes usable knowledge when it can be connected quickly to the problem at hand i.e. when it can be placed into immediate context. If you are into equations, knowledge could be represented like this:

Context + Information = Knowledge

Imagine if your problem had a process for systematically working through it… Imagine if you could connect the information available around this process directly into the process… Or to the role to which the process has been assigned… Or to the department in which the process resides… Or to the business that contains the department…

Imagine if you could explore the information required to do your job excellently in a way that makes sense to what you are doing right now…

Ok. Stop Imagining.

XSol’s structured process modeller provides the missing link. While it has many uses, from a DMS point of view, XSol’s structured process modeller creates the context that your DMS stuffed full of information desperately needs.

And if you do not have a DMS - just an ad-hoc folder structure somewhere, XSol can easily become the central point for accessing it. So the knowledge equation above becomes more like this:

XSol + Information = Knowledge

If you deal in process management, business improvement, HR, OH & S, or you just want to understand what the heck happens and who is responsible for what goes on in your office/ department/business, XSol might be for you.