How to Organize Your Informational Space

Every company, no matter if it is а small startup or а multinational corporation, faces the same challenge — surviving under heaps of documents and other corporate content. The documents come from partners, regulators and other external organizations, and are created in the depths of the company. There are plenty of recipes for combatting the hydra of corporate information, but most of them just say, “Do an audit of existing documents, classify documents and compose retention policies”. Sounds good, but such recipes are too common and abstract to be somewhat useful.

The main challenge is making up your own principles of how to tidy up your documents.

Having your content organized will help you reach some meaningful aims:

• You can easily find any document. This means lower operational costs and better productivity.
• You can track а required document and tell who is working with it at this very moment.
• You can always be sure that you are working with the latest version of a document.
• You can substantially reduce the number of lost documents.
• You can drastically reduce time you spend retrieving documents. Besides, you can be sure that your document selection is complete. That can be critical when you respond а regulator’s or а shareholder’s request.
• You can considerably cut penalties caused by incompliance with regulators’ rules and requirements.
• You can quickly approve any document.
• You can allocate access rights to each particular group of documents and be confident that your information is confidential and safe from unauthorized eyes.

Organization of the content here means dividing corporate information into classes or groups. Classifying information is definitely а sort of art, and there are many different approaches to it.

Document management system: help is here

Modern document management software can help you significantly on the way of organizing corporate content. Here users can create their personal environment and organize documents for their own convenience: to simplify and boost search, to build workspace for а project.

In such system, every user is enabled to create а personal folder structure. Folders can contain documents, jobs, tasks, inner folders and other system components.

Flow folders can also be an effective organizational tool. A document management system can automatically organize your tasks into such folders. For example, you can find approval tasks in the Approval flow folder. This way you can easily and quickly find relevant documents and tasks. 

In a document management system when you add а document to а particular folder, it does not change its position in the repository. Instead, а new link to it is created. That allows users to put multiple links to different folders, all of them referring to the same object. When you alter а document or its card, the result is reflected in every folder containing а link to this document. This way you don’t have to create a lot of versions but always work with one and the same document no matter in what number of folders its link is contained.

Document management software also has efficient tools for organizing documents’ storage and easy search. To quickly find documents, tasks, or assignments you can create a search folder that will automatically display items based on specified search criteria (name, author, date of creation, status, etc.).

Such systems enable users to ensure documents’ confidentiality by allocating various types of access rights.

Some document management software also visualizes your business processes and working progress through widgets that add a nice touch to the organization of content.