Digital resource management, like many flavors of information technology, is in a state of change and progression. In this changing environment, it’s important to look over your organization’s practices and determine if there’s anything that you can improve upon in order to get that extra edge.
In this post, we’ll explore some of the areas of collaborative information management. Ideally, this will open your perspective to some questions that will end up saving you a lot of time and worry.
Driving Change
Your organization may have already made some important decisions and changes to the process that controls your records. But does everyone inside accept that process? Having a schedule of records created, archived, or destroyed is useless if someone isn’t following it.
One idea on how to manage this is to integrate everyone into the decision making process. Make sure that people have ownership over the responsibilities. Think about what leaks you might have in your organization and find solutions that are most appropriate for you—and don’t hesitate to seek other opinions to help you get a solid process.
Policy Frameworks
In a collaborative environment, it’s a good idea to have active policies that govern all sorts of relevant, on-the-job tasks. Many great companies have policies to govern even social media interactions, for example. If you don’t have a lot of outreach in your business activities, you may think it’s more important to focus on inside operations—like how to tag electronic documents.
Regardless of the process, having a policy to fall back on means that you will save time when an issue arises in that arena. If you’ve got a document management policy and the right technologies to help you, there’s never a need to wonder where a certain resource it. You can simply locate it and retrieve it.
Personal and Mobile Devices
Don’t count out personal and mobile devices as part of your information management process. An employee may have a mobile device in the field that collects data or takes notes that will be crucial for another person’s workflow. It’s not always necessary to keep a strict watch on a personal device, but it may be important to offer a digital locker where they can put files or information that might be important in the workplace. Alternatively, you might find that it’s a good idea to allow workers access to information when they are out of the office—this can sometimes be a factor in boosting productivity.
Best Practices Are Individual
Although these considerations are brought to you with the intent to help you think more critically about your process, it’s also important to remember that industry best practices are not always best for your situation. Your organization needs its own policies and technologies that will drive your organization to become more efficient.
If you’re interest in finding out what policies are most important for your organization, it’s best to contact professionals as a starting point. If you’ve already implemented some policies or practices that are specific to your workplace, tell us what has worked and what to avoid in the comments.
