Teamwork shouldn’t be so painful. Every important business activity is a collaborative one. But why do professionals find collaboration and especially collaboration around documents to be so painful? We surveyed 1,400 business people globally to get some answers. The highlight conclusions:
No professional is an island. But teamwork is frustrating.
Virtually every process depends on documents and almost all are built by teams. But 79% found the collaboration process to be frustrating.
The collaboration process is broken, and email is the culprit.
Feedback on legal, finance, and other business documents is shared principally via email for 59% of teams. That means that when you send a draft to 10 people looking for feedback, you’ll likely receive 10 replies with 10 attachments and 10 sets of different feedback spread across those attachments.
It’s no surprise then that the most frustrated group of users were those that relied on email for their feedback gathering.
Collaboration needs process. But processes are inefficient.
Email is the conduit for business document approvals for 61% of respondents. And since most documents require 3 or more people to approve them, this can add up to lots of email approvals when you have dozens of documents. That means that 61% of the time it is difficult for team members to determine whether a document has truly been authorized. That leads to more delays.
Structured and Social tools cut effort dramatically.
56% of respondents described the process as at least easy when using document management or collaboration tools. And nearly 70% found that they had better control over their sensitive information like contracts and financial documents. And they also found that they could deliver approved documents – and more importantly – finalized processes up to 1/3 faster than without the tools.
Here's a handy infographic and video that assesses the responses in even more detail. http://ow.ly/dExaq
#documentmanagement #InformationGovernance #Collaboration #Collaboration