EXECUTIVE CORNER By Don Post

Extreme Makover: Enterprise Edition

A Game You Can't Afford To Lose!

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition is one of my favorite TV shows. Each episode is a race against time on a project that would ordinarily take at least four months to achieve, involving a team of designers, contractors and several hundred workers who have just seven days to rebuild an entire house – every room, even the exterior and landscaping – for a deserving family. Success requires everyone to cooperate. Inevitably, tensions flare as tastes are disputed and the deadline approaches.

Extreme Makeover: Enterprise Edition

This show is a lot like the real-life business. We confront issues of cooperation, personality conflicts, differing priorities, deadlines, and budgets with the goal of managing their paper and electronic documents.

The enterprise version of Extreme Makeover has especially high career risks: stalled or ended careers, and the chance the organization can be exposed to everything from financial fines to bankruptcy and business failure – all if documents or records can’t be managed correctly.

How To Win the Game

Organizations can win the game. The actions to take are appropriate to different applications and departments, but the improvements can be enterprise wide. Below are what I call Six Strategic Imperatives (e.g., improvement opportunities) that provide a framework for future implementation in virtually all departments, and help establish priorities and funding.

1. 
   Systematically control and reduce paper proliferation, handling, storage and disposition. Productivity is invariably improved as paper is integrated to electronic documents.
2. 
   Link access to related electronic documents from enterprise systems like SAP, Oracle, etc. There is a direct correlation between data in these systems and the related documents, records, emails in burgeoning repositories (paper or electronic). Making it quick and easy for users to access documents is critical.
3. 
   Improve management of electronic files in shared directories and email by transitioning to the EDRMS infrastructure. Almost everyone agrees that throughout the organization these are disaster areas in most enterprises.
4. 
   Support electronic work process initiation, approval, tracking and completion. Most of our clients have electronic templates (e.g., travel expenses) that are filled out online, printed out, sent to an approver for signature then mailed to accounting where data is rekeyed. Most of the steps starting with printing are wasteful and expensive.
5. 
   Support flexible “paperless” data collection, review and entry. By replacement of all paper with data from eforms/Webforms, etc., improvement in accuracy, timeliness and efficiency is assured.
6. 
   Enable records classification, retention and disposition of both paper and electronic documents. All the policies and retention plans are of little value if infrastructure and training aren’t in place to enable compliance with records governance.

These initiatives, which can be easily understood by the organization’s leadership and stakeholders, should be adopted by organizations through policies and promotion.

The Ultimate Prize

Just as in the Home Edition where a family gets a new home customized to their unique needs, application of the strategic imperatives brings revitalization and increased security to the organization. We’re not talking just document management; we’re talking revitalizing processes and transforming an organization from being stagnant and paper bound to being nimble, having electronic access to information it needs to conduct its daily business in the most efficient and effective manner possible. The ultimate prize is an organizational transformation.

The payoff in the U.S. alone for realization of these six imperatives has got to be in the 100’s of billions of dollars. White collar productivity improvement will likely exceed 5-10 percent, with improvement in customer service levels of 10-20 percent. If that isn’t Extreme Makeover: Enterprise Edition, I don’t know what is.

Don Post is is partner of IMERGE Consulting, Inc. He can be reached at 815-398-0344 or dpost@imergeconsult.com.

Download this artilce as pdf.

top of page