How can artificial intelligence (“AI”) and auto-classification help you? Cleaning out the garage or basement? Reorganizing your closet? Organizing your family photographs? Some of you are experiencing anxiety just thinking about those tasks. Sorry, AI is not going to help.
Here’s another anxiety generator – reorganizing and cleaning out your company shared drive or online file system. Imagine how good that would feel, especially if AI did it all. Not likely to happen either. At least not on its own. If you want to achieve the significant benefits of well organized, accessible information, here are some tips for such a large, complex project.
Define what “cleaned up and well organized” means and have consensus throughout the company. Is there a current structure that seems to work best among the many filing methods in use? There are always competing visions and methods, but one is usually a clear winner for its logical order. Focus on that method as the goal.
Identify and prioritize the most critical repositories and start with those. Identify the files or documents that really drive your company, customer contracts, project files, accounting records, employee files. It might be nice to clean up or clear out a folder full of files for a former subsidiary, but that can wait.
Determine if the critical repositories could benefit from a document management system with control instead of an open shared network drive or online folder system. We always recommend a System of Record for the final versions of critical documents and a separate solution for working files. A clear path from working drive to System of Record is the key.
Next, make sure you have both human and tech resources available. You can use AI to take a first pass, but you will still need humans to check and confirm files. There might be zip files full of other files – to split or not to split. There could be files that are support for other files but also exist as duplicate stand-alone files. Humans are best able to work through these issues.
Lastly, set realistic timing goals. This is not a project that can be completed over a weekend. Remember that your human resources have other responsibilities and end users will need to be re-trained. Also remember that some project participants are not going to be comfortable making broad decisions on issues that come up so have a project lead. Realistic goals mean months not weeks.
At the end of this task, you will experience some euphoria. You will also experience the rath of some co-workers that just don’t like change. Those users may have been responsible for the hornets’ nest in the first place. Use available tools to monitor the new system or structure. Good training and well-defined processes will help maintain the new habits.
Millennia Group provides a document fabric solution including capture, workflow and critical document archive and services a wide range of companies and industries. For more information visit our website or contact us.
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