I remember when I was in elementary school (don’t laugh), my best friend Danny tried to change one of the grades on his quarterly report card. We used to walk home from school together and on this day we stopped at the corner drug store where he bought some office supplies and went about “altering” his report card.
Ahhh … the things you think you can get away with 5th grade … so foolish. It was a great plan for Danny right up until the point his Mom spotted the obvious change. Needless to say, Danny’s report cards could no longer be trusted as an accurate representation of his school performance. It completely backfired and his report cards got more scrutiny than he could have ever wanted, all the way through high school. I think he makes fake passports today (kidding). He actually works for a large financial institution (not kidding).
This one incident made Danny’s parent’s suspicious of the entire school grade reporting process and they never trusted report cards again. He ruined it for his younger sister too. It’s the same with documents. We need a better process (and technology) to ensure our documents and records can be trusted for business decision making. The implications in business are far more catastrophic.
Consider the large distributor who has multiple versions of contracts and supplier agreements. The business fails to reference the correct version of a contract addendum that materially changes key terms and conditions between the parties. This results in a dispute and has trickle-down implications of disrupting shipments which customer complaints and canceled orders … all because someone used the wrong content. In short, it’s paramount to have trust in our content.
Here are three strategies you can take to bring trust to your content:
Clean-up the backlog
Assess and separate trusted content from suspect content. Decommission and dispose of what is not necessary to keep. Preserve and exploit your trusted content from your trusted content repositories.
Instrument ad-hoc and controlled document creation and approval processes
Establish event and process-based steps (or KPIs) to measure, trigger, review and monitor the accuracy of content that is designated as trusted.
Enhance metadata and leverage master data
Clean up dirty document metadata and reference trusted data sources within the enterprise. Ensure an accurate 360-degree view all information assets and metadata. Obviously, there are a number of ways to make content quality better and improve document-based decision making. The trick is … how to do it without burdening the business users. Manual methods are thought to be easy but always fail as human beings are inconsistent, sometimes inaccurate and can refuse to cooperate. In some rare cases … humans take matters into their own hands. Don’t take a “Danny” approach to trust your content.
Choose one or more of the above paths and increase the accuracy of content-based decisions in your organization. If you don’t, I may have to send Danny’s Mom out to have a talk with you.