Analyzing Corporate Documents

I remember reading - I think, it was PC Week – a true horror story about corporate documents. Much more horrible than “Sinister”, “Conjuring” and “Event Horizon” together. Even if you add “Alien vs Predator” to the pack. The story stated that 80% of corporate documents have zero value for its readers.

Actually, they have negative value, because they waste time of company employees who are reading these… well, ‘documents’. A highly valuable time – especially if we are talking about your corporate executives. Which means that these ‘documents’ not only do not add value, they actively destroy value in your company. Fortunately, about 30% of corporate documents are never read. Or unfortunately, because some of these unread document might very well belong to the 20% valuable ones.

Therefore, to maximize your corporate performance and financial value created by your company, you must make sure that it generates and disseminates only valuable documents. Obviously, you must start with analyzing your existing corporate documents.

And this is what you will need to know about your corporate documents:

1.      Meaningful name that reflects is content

2.      Document type (text, table, presentation, chart, picture, video, etc.)

3.      Document format (MS Word, Excel, PDF, etc.)

4.      Function in your corporate management system

5.      Detailed explanation of how the document in question generates value – financial, functional and emotional. The document has the right to exist only if it is valuable

6.      Author of the document in question

7.      Manager of the document in question (who may not necessarily be the same individual as its author)

8.      Users (your employees that have the right to access the document in question). Every document is supposed to be used to generate value, not just read

There are essentially two categories in your corporate information system – documents proper and queries that extract knowledge (formatted as documents) from your corporate knowledge base. Therefore, when describing queries, you must add one more attribute – description of querying methodology.

Obviously, items (4) and (5) are the most important, closely followed by (7) and (8).