India Lagging in Document Management

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In fact, a survey across 775 organizations in the country last month revealed that more than half of the 995 respondents were not happy with the documentation, productivity, and collaboration tools used at their workplace. According to the findings of the study, "The State of Indian Knowledge Workers," conducted by Adobe India, half the respondents confessed to spending more than 25 percent of their work week resolving issues related to document management, retrieval, and review. Eighty percent felt they were wasting precious time in trying to get documents approved and signed.

Obviously, this is a major hit to productivity and efficiency, and CIOs are looking to address it. A recent Gartner report says India will be the world's third fastest-growing enterprise software market through 2016. It names enterprise content management (of which DMS is an element) and team collaboration among the fastest-growing segments in the next five years. What is more telling is that the report suggests that the fast growth in these areas is mainly because enterprises are lagging behind.

How should CIOs approach the challenge of making workers and the organization more productive? Here are some suggestions:

• If your organization is a late-comer on the DMS scene, take a second look. Vendors are consolidating various services -- DMS, archiving, imaging as well as aligning business process management solutions.

• Do not treat the issue as a mere document management challenge. Try to embrace a new communication culture which includes workflow systems, wikis, internal social media, instant messaging functionality, and task management systems. Social intelligence tools like Microsoft SharePoint's Box, Saleforce's Chatter, and Jive and business analytics solutions are emerging.

• Interoperability with enterprise applications and compatibility with already commissioned ERP modules need to be checked. Integration of the DMS with desktop productivity tools, ease of use, and offline availability is also an important factor.

• Knowledge organizations have project teams that collaborate both internally and externally. So there is need to pay extra attention to security outside the firewall. According to Forrester Consulting, 73 percent of knowledge workers collaborate with people in different time zones and regions monthly–not all are inside the enterprise. Sixty-seven percent of the global collaborators work with people in other companies at least monthly.

The role of cloud computing and mobility can't be ignored. In the Adobe survey, 68 percent of the respondents were already using smartphones and tablets to access documents. Ninety percent said their use of smartphones and tablets would increase for document creation, management, and review. Indeed, knowledge workers are already seeking these tools and bringing them into the work environment themselves. BYOD and SaaS would require a closer look at data retention and governance policies. Open-source technologies aligned with cloud are also gaining popularity.

DMS doesn't seem glamorous in comparison to cloud and mobility projects. But to make a truly efficient organization, CIOs can't ignore the fundamentals they've ignored up to this point. They should ensure document management and collaboration that meets expectations of on-the-go employees, scales cost effectively across the enterprise and beyond, offers security and privacy, and is flexible enough to span languages, computing platforms, and computer skills.