Real Money: $X Cost Savings Realized by Implementing A Document Management Solution
Since my last post about how I could have used a Document Management (DM) system in a former life, I’ve been thinking about the statement I made about how certain I was that it would have saved the company time and money had we used a DM solution. That’s the kind of statement that a Tech enthusiast likes to make withouth substantiation, and yes I’m a tech enthusiast. However, it would be much more powerful to boil it down to dollars and cents. It wouldn’t take much to truly quantify those savings either. Additionally, it wouldn’t take much effort to estimate savings and calculate a projected ROI for DM implementation.
I’m thinking back to my week of Lean Six Sigma Green Belt training, and I recall the general concept that you can’t improve a process that hasn’t been measured. That said, it would be fairly easy to simply time someone performing a task or set of tasks before DM implementation to estimate cost savings, and then again after DM implementation to monitor progress. You could go deep and set up a control chart if you really wanted to, which actually may yield information about special cases that cause delays, and provide further opportunities for automation.
I’m wondering if any Six Sigma experts or system integrators out there have actually done any projects that leveraged DM software to increase knowledge worker efficiency and automate their work. If so, please comment here and share what you’ve found!
March 24th, 2009 at 12:34 am
Something came up in WordPress “hackers” mail list that reminded me of the document control system I contrived in the late 80s. (Oh my, if only I had been in touch with TimBL!)
The problem, which remains virulent: software version control just plain doesn’t work on documents. (And no, I’m not going to do a second year of psycho-linguistics to explicate just now, noooo way!)
What I realized (perhaps because of the 15years I’d already been working towards “participatory deliberation”) is that documentation is verbose. Which is to say that it’s a thin soup of rhetoric with the occasional lump (not always greasy) of salient data.
I called them “factoids” … a significant datum can be tracked while the surrounding rhetoric can be treated like packaging.
And if a change “matters”, well then whatever that change touched should be tracked as though a configuration item.
I wish I cared enough to implement this.
Alas, Spaceship Earth commands my entire attention.
Except for the berimbau … which is an entirely different kettle of fish.
heh