Dealing with reams of paperwork is the bane of every HR manager’s existence – and a prime candidate for process improvement using technology. However, implementing a document management strategy requires detailed planning, tenacity and a company-wide commitment. Angus Kidman reports
Dealing with reams of paperwork is the bane of every HR manager’s existence – and a prime candidate for process improvement using technology. However, implementing a document management strategy requires detailed planning, tenacity and a company-wide commitment. Angus Kidman reports
The notion of electronic filing might sound dull, but effective document management has become big business for large software vendors. According to Gartner, document management software sales topped US$1.5 billion ($2.04) billion last year. “There are still companies with only a single copy of master contracts and important files – they have no paper or electronic backup,” Gartner notes in its overview of the market. “This clearly puts the business at risk. The basic task is to image those documents and have the electronic image stored offsite.”
As well as providing effective backup in event of disaster, such records can be essential to meet regulatory compliance obligations. Indeed, growing pressure to meet local obligations like CLERP and overseas regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley are forcing many companies to upgrade their approach to document management, whatever the cost.
As well as these legal benefits, document management can introduce much greater efficiency into human resources operations. However, HR managers need to recognise early on that effective document management can’t be implemented purely on the departmental level. Because every element of a business will generate documentation, an effective strategy will ultimately need to be able to handle material from a wide variety of sources.
“Enterprise content management and collaboration are rapidly becoming infrastructure decisions,”says Forrester Research analyst Kyle McNabb.
Because of the high volume of paperwork it generates, HR will often be central to those activities, but a purely HR-focused document management strategy will have decidedly limited impact. Indeed, many document management strategies are driven by the finance department, since it tends to handle and generate the most legally sensitive records.
Belmont builds
That’s not to say that businesses can’t begin their document management activities on a smaller scale, provided planning for further integration is incorporated. That was the approach taken the Perth municipality of Belmont, where a document management system has helped the local council more effectively meet the needs of its employees and 30,000 residents.
The immediate incentive for upgrading the document management system was the installation of new software for managing property records, including complex geographical information. “What we needed was a way to get information about properties and locations tied in to the volumes of records we kept on each property,” says director of corporate and governance Stuart Cole. Access to general historical information was also important. “We needed to give our staff an easy way to search and access this information, and also a way for them to capture new information electronically into the central repository.”
Another key requirement was that the data management software would integrate with existing business packages. “Our core systems are used to manage a wide range of services, including building, planning, health and public works,” says Cole.
Belmont eventually chose DataWorks, an Australian-developed content management system developed specifically for use in local government. Installing the technology was relatively straightforward; a bigger challenge was implementing the cultural change required to make all staff recognise their role in achieving the document management strategy.
“Initially we met with resistance to the idea that every member of staff would in some way be responsible for managing information,” Cole says. “Most people simply didn’t consider it to be a part of their jobs. Only through education – and demonstrable results – did we show that taking individual ownership of information management meant benefits for everyone across the board, and ultimately translated into benefits for our customers.”
Integrated workflow has helped deliver those benefits. “Documents generated in our other applications can be stored in DataWorks, which ensures all of our corporate documents are centralised, indexed and searchable.” Loss of records is also much lesser common, Cole says.
Storage issues
One issue that all businesses will have to consider is how their documents will be stored. Document management systems designed primarily to scan and handle existing paper documents have tended to use formats such as image format file (TIFF), which accurately render the appearance of the originals. There’s a considerable disadvantage to that approach, however in that indexing is markedly less efficient, since the entire contents of the document haven’t been rendered into machine-readable form. This problem can be partially overcome through the use of optical character recognition (OCR) or by manually entering key document information, but the former approach is often unreliable and the latter consumes extra time and resources.
“The current prevalent archiving format standards, TIFF and portable document format (PDF), are too limiting because of the increasing need to support compliance and electronic discovery,” says Forrester Research analyst Robert Markham.
As documents are increasingly created in digital format at creation, new alternatives are emerging. Many businesses use the PDF format made popular by Adobe, but Markham argues that also has limitations. “PDF is proprietary to Adobe, creating a risk to organisations using PDF for archiving. Adobe controls its development and is under no obligation to continue publishing the specification for future versions. The PDF format was never designed specifically for use as an archive format and has been constrained as an archive format by vendor-dependent development.”
A better choice is an open standard based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), which can be read by a variety of applications and isn’t tied to any particular vendor. Such conversion projects are inevitably time consuming. Victorian water services provider Western Water (another DataWorks user) is currently in the middle of a major project to convert all its records into electronic form, a process that is scheduled to take three years. While that will be a time consuming task, the stringent regulatory requirements applied to the utilities sector make it essential. “The onus is on us to ensure we have an efficient electronic document capture and storage system for all new records, and for records dating back several years,” said information and technology manager Dave McDonald.
The planning process
Building a centralised strategy takes time, and many organisations begin their experiments with document management within a particular framework. Financial services firm Perpetual Trustees developed expertise in document management by introducing an automated system for its accounts payable division. Built by systems integrator Indigo Pacific, the custom solution ensured that processes were followed correctly and enabled the creation of key documents electronically and was rolled out in just under three months.
“Paperless records have significantly improved Perpetual’s accounts payable processes. The system has also brought about other benefits including reduced manual archiving costs and improved business continuity planning,” says Jamie Palmer, manager for financial systems and projects.
Further expansion remains part of the vision. “We looked at some accounts payable-specific workflow systems but chose this option to enable us to create new non-accounts payable workflows throughout the finance department as the opportunities arose. We also wanted a system that was easy to maintain and change as financial policies and procedures changed.”
One means of achieving effective document management is to integrate as many processes as possible into a single software platform. Mortgage processing house National Lending Solutions uses a single custom business application, based on the FileMaker database system, to produce the majority of its documents and handle most business processes. Having a single system greatly simplifies the management of both inputs and outputs.
“We have strived to create a system that gives us commonality, consistency and most importantly, ownership across all facets of our organisation,” CEO Michael Noyce says. “Our staff love using the system because of its ease of use and the process ownership it allows. The system also helps minimise internal errors such as re-work or multiple data entry and provides a significant speed differentiator over other systems and our competitors.”
Broader schemes which cover multiple platforms can take longer to implement. In January this year, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) begin implementing a comprehensive document management system, designed to cover all document requirements from creation to destruction. Given APRA’s central role in overseeing the financial services market, effective document management is critical. More than 300,000 records are included in the system, which is being implemented by Alphawest and is due to go live in early 2006.
Choose your format
When choosing how to store documents, the following issues need to be considered:
• Ease of retrieval, so that staff can re-purpose documents as necessary
• Ease of searching, with as much relevant metadata as possible
• Access to audit-relevant information such as creation dates
• Appropriate security levels, so that personal information isn’t compromised
• Longevity of format support, so that documents can be accessed in the future
