Interwoven’s Recovered Information

April 2, 2007: According to Interwoven, Australian employees are not complying with document management policies because as they’re still not properly putting their documents away.

Interwoven says more than one in five organisation ‘always’ have to recover information from locations that do not fit with governed processes, such as employee desktops.

With 98 percent of respondents claiming they are either ‘always’ or ‘sometimes’ having to recover information from locations falling outside of governing document management processes, it’s clear people processes are still not completely in order for dealing with governed procedures. But Interwoven says it’s important for organisations to get their expectations of employees in order. “It’s not realistic to expect you’re going to get 100 percent, because in the end, there are actual users involved,” says Chris Lynch, managing director of Interwoven.

“It’s really up to organisations to ensure individuals are well trained, all systems need to be understandable by employees,” says Lynch.

The results come off the back of a recent series of customer seminars across Australia and New Zealand where Interwoven surveyed attendees on the document management challenges facing their organisations.

For Lynch, the real surprise to come out of the Interwoven seminar series was the amount of organisations who still hadn’t move forward on getting their emails under control. “I’m surprised so many don’t have email solutions,” he says. “Especially as they’re having to deal with such large attachment files in emails alongside version controls.”

Another surprise Lynch encountered was the amount of organisations still printing their emails, a surprise that might reflect the conundrum of having to dealing with both electronic and paper-based documents. As a means to centralising unstructured data, the Interwoven survey found almost half of respondents identified a need for ‘containers.’

It is these ‘containers’ that are known in legal circles as matter-centric collaboration. At Interwoven, they’re calling it a document management enabler and labelling it as a ‘Work Space.’ “It’s what we have created as the means to group everything about a project or a team into the one area, with all email correspondence etc under the one project container,” says Lynch. “They can pull up their container, know what went on and who was involved.”

“The processes required to manage all correspondence in a legal matter are not dissimilar to those needed to manage correspondence related to a specific project.”

In terms of top priorities for current IT projects, Interwoven found its respondents to be evenly split between centralisation, compliance, email management and document sharing.

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