Currently, the businesses around the world are facing a transition in the ways they manage the business. Initially, they were used to managing businesses from on-site locations, paper documents. With technology gaining rapid relevance in the business world, the way to manage the business has changed to remote access to multiple locations at one time, online communication, and online documentation. Majority of the businesses are working on two methods with respect to document management: Hard copy documents which are growing in piles and Soft copy documents which are becoming increasingly complex to track and manage.

This increasing burden on employees to manage these documents are adding to frustration at the workplace.

In order to stay compliant with regulations and standards along with improving efficiency, an Effective Document Management system is required now more than ever.

Start with a strong and clear policy for document management supported by the indexing system to classify the documents. A secured computer network systems are required to ensure the safety of documents. With cloud-based storage, a single central repository of all enterprise-wide documents would make document dynamic to changes and would be easy to track changes in the document. Integrate your offline documents with the online system by designing system to track the holder of the document, contents of the document and recent changes in them.

Review all the documents in the enterprise

Create a repository of all the documents out there in the system. Review all Hard Drives, internal networks, and any remote storage and audit all the data files, documents, emails, images and multimedia files which are the property of the organization. Audit all your files for their access, visibility, and security.

Classify the Data

What shall add value to document management is information classification. Develop indexing structure with a single nomenclature to be adopted across all the organization. This would help in tracking the document and ease the access to the document to relevant stakeholders. Indexing should also incorporate for any version updating of the files so that there is only one updated version of any file.

Identify the access level of documents

Some documents are required to share with all employees of the organization which might require read-only access. Some documents might be confidential to specific management or department and would not be accessible to every employee. Design the access level with who would have no access, read access, edit access and share access.

Decide Document Retention Timeline

With storage space limited across organization and multitude of files generated on daily basis, it is important to decide the document retention timeline so as to ensure regular clean-up of storage with documents past their storage timeline would be removed from the active storage system. However, depending on the importance of the document, it can be stored in passive storage for long-term retention.

Setup policy and control system

It is important to set policies which would govern the document management system in the organization. Setup control measures to track employee compliance with the policies.

Establish Breach Management Policy

Establish actionable policies in case of any breach. Decide the urgency of the breach, understand the causes of the breach and implement controls to avoid such breaches in the future.

VComply provides an integrated enterprise cloud document management. It eases the document sharing and communication concerning the document.

For more on document management,  click here.

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