Creating company presentations, project documents, offers and fiscal reports on top of old documents is something most of us are accustomed to. We focus on the visual layer: edit it, recreate content, and fill in information – wasting time doing all that. The organization ends up with a collection of documents that resembles more of its creators than the organization’s intent.

Very few of us think where the document originates from and what it may contain. Behind the surface, at the metadata level, may very well be critical information that should not be passed on. 

“All documents contain surprisingly lot of invisible data to help manage its lifecycle”, Jarkko Ollikainen, CEO at Document House explains. “Thus, copying an old version or fetching a suitable template from the web exposes the organization to unnecessary risks.”

“Getting the process on the right track at the very beginning is the key."

Ollikainen points out that every document should be considered a liability.

“There should be a commonly agreed procedure for publishing and maintaining templates and an easy way to use them – helped with automation, ensuring that only the master versions of the templates will be used to create new documents,” Ollikainen mentions. “Varying manual practices in the most fundamental issues such as naming and saving a document should be made rule-based. 

The creation phase has a lot more impact on document management than most of us perceive. Getting the process on the right track at the very beginning is the key.”

In turning these visions into reality, easy and convenient practices with automation work better than strict instructions. As an outcome, the organization has an up-to-date collection of document templates to drive business performance. While this also helps manage the documents in a purposeful way, it saves plenty of time now that the employees do not have to wrestle with old templates or search for the latest versions.