If one reviews the vision, goals, strategies and associated operational priorities of most SME's, it is apparent that all are reliant on the ability to efficiently and securely create, store, retrieve, share and disseminate information and knowledge.
Some common issues encountered by SME's due to the lack of an information management system include:
- High risk of a poor outcome in a disaster recovery scenario.
- Nonexistent process to capture and harness both explicit and tacit knowledge.
- Documents are hard to find.
- Content is hard to manipulate and repurpose.
- Documents are hard to update or share.
- Content is hard to publish consistently.
- Document creation and review is an ad-hoc process.
- The importance of a documents content is not obvious.
- Paper-based distribution and storage is costs in terms of storage, copying and printing.
- Paper based archiving is expensive to maintain and inefficient for retrieval.
In fact, according to Gartner research, time wasted on physical document management alone can add up to 8 hours per person per week.
Some of the potential benefits of implementing an information management solution include:
- Greater chance of achieving your vision and goals.
- Competitive advantage (or at least not a competitive disadvantage).
- Cost savings.
- Process consistency.
- Reduced physical storage.
- Flexible retrieval and indexing.
- Improved, faster and more flexible search.
- Controlled and improved document distribution.
- Improved security.
- Improved disaster recovery.
- No lost files; Digital archiving.
- Improved regulatory compliance.
- Improved internal operations.
- Improved customer service and satisfaction.
- Preserved intellectual capital (organisational knowledge).
Balance can help you collect and define your business requirements then design, build, commission and maintain a fit-for-purpose solution using Microsoft's SharePoint platform.