Tulsa Records Management at Vaillus IT
Your company knows a lot. The problems is that your employees tuck this knowledge away in filing cabinets, hard drives, or keep it locked in their heads. Vaillus IT’s Tulsa Records Management and Knowledge Management team wrangles your paper and electronic documents into one common place where finding what you need is easy. We help you learn about your company and have insight both from what your team writes down and what your key employees just know. Call us at 918-734-7215 and start learning what your business and people already know.
Unstructured Data
This type of data is written on paper or electronic forms or documents. These documents get filled with key words useful for identifying and searching for them. Values located in expected places on a document, such as a date or invoice number, are called “metadata”, which means “data about data”. Keywords are terms or phrases that appear in the body of the document. They suggest what the document is about and are useful for searching. Examples are a city name, person’s name, a topic of discussion, a project name or some other common phrase.
Stamping key words on paper file folders makes finding documents easier. Documents having a storage hierarchy, such as a document in a file folder in a drawer in a cabinet, have terms at all those levels.. In the electronic world, metadata is found in the filename itself and the folder hierarchy it resides in. There is some capability in every computer operating system to search by filenames and even keywords.
Searching, Searching
Raise your hand if you don’t mind scanning through filing cabinets and network folders. We all hate it, but we need to get to our stuff. According to a survey by Recommind, an e-discovery and data insight provider, employees spend on average 38 minutes looking for a single document. Often they get colleagues to help with the search.
That’s a lot of wasted time. It shows finding the documents we are looking for quickly translates into lower costs and higher profits.
Structured Data
What if you could choose that common values, scan the documents, and then easily find the documents later using the values ? This is how most of us use the Internet. Database Development and controlled vocabularies put a consistent form around the search terms for a set of documents of the same type. Knowledge Management professionals create a searchable index with a known structure. Finding documents is much faster andsimpler with such an index in place.
How much easier would it be if you could search a group of scanned documents by some familiar terms from your own desk? No more bothering coworkers, or digging through boxes and filing cabinets. How much time would this save? How much better can you prepare for an emergency such as an audit or natural disaster? That’s a game-changer.
Tacit Knowledge
There is a whole other store of critical information that is even harder to get at than paper or electronic documents. “Tacit” knowledge is what your company intuitively knows. It is the crucial and irreplaceable information stowed away in your key and long-term employees’ minds, and in your own mind for that matter. Every business, large or small, faces the challenge of turning this tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge. The best organizations record and shared this knowledge with the team and ensure that will be around long into the future.
Danger Ahead
If the information that drives your business is primarily in unstructured and tacit form, you are playing a dangerous game. Natural disasters, business disruptions, turnover, and technology upgrades can all have devastating effects on your ability to retrieve the information necessary to respond to a crisis, make critical decisions, and answer questions about why you have what you have and do what you do.
Many industries are under the pressure of creeping regulation and the threat of unexpected litigation. Just responding to a lawsuit or audit can consume staggering amounts of effort and money, tie up your key people, and disrupt normal operations for months.
Prepare for the Inevitable
Sadly, much of this is unnecessary. Tracking required information and laying your hands on it when you need it lets you take unexpected events in stride. Capturing the tacit knowledge your business generates daily in accessible form lays the groundwork for making solid decisions down the road and gives your team the confidence act. No more fire drills scrambling to find the information you need.
Shared Explicit Knowledge
Our Records and Knowledge Management Methodology is what gives us the ability to implement a controlled vocabulary throughout your organization, a lexicon of terms, their definitions and acceptable usage. If differences in language could scatter the people to the four corners, what is it doing to your office when long-term employees use terms the new staffers aren’t familiar with, or different departments refer to the same concept with different names.
Our Tulsa Records Management team analyzes your business documents to discover where and how you use the terms you do. Forms, applications, folder naming conventions, document names, column headings, section headings, and report headings, are all important “artifacts” that reveal common terms. We meet with you to settle on an agreed-upon lexicon of acceptable terms, called a “taxonomy”. We help you implement the taxonomy across your entire organization.
Better Record Keeping
We work with you to implement a record keeping system that puts information at your fingertips. This is done by implementing a content management system (CMS) application like SharePoint and tagging documents with meaningful metadata values. Administrators secure the CMS so the right people can get to what they need, when and where they need it.
This is a revolutionary way to run your business. So few do it well. Most organizations suffer the pain of poor Document Management and stifled communication in small chunks. They never tally up the immense total cost of searching for file and the delays of struggling to communicate.
Better Knowledge from Better Processes and Software
Good Records and Knowledge Management practices are just as important as the other disciplines when choosing the right software packages. An important part of improving core long-chain business processes is establish a common terminology and knowing how it applies. Vendor-supplied software and custom software development work together to implement solutions that meet the unique needs of each business. Intentionally designed processes with the right software produce less paper and stick to a common language, reducing cost and miscommunication. With metadata kept in databases, companies can access, leverage, report on, roll-up, filter, slice and dice it to gain insight and make decisions. Applications leverage each others’ data. Custom reports rolled it up into a consolidated view of business operations.
Well-designed long-chain business processes eliminate duplicate and unnecessary data and report generation that plague records management. They capture data in databases and convert it into useful detail and summary reports. Data Analysts no longer key data into spreadsheets that are error-prone and difficult to combine.
Don’t be Held Back
No world class organization can operate without top-notch Records Management and Knowledge Management initiatives. Without them, you might be able to grow your business, but you will struggle to scale it. More business means more unstructured records and tacit knowledge spread across more people. The company’s operations quickly bog down from the inability to communicate and collaborate. If you don’t capture information in a place you trust, you will hesitate to take on new business opportunities.
Your Tulsa Records Management Experts
Don’t let data and documents hold you captive. We are the Tulsa Records Management and Business Process experts. We help you capture data in places you trust and deliver it to your team when and where they needed using well designed systems and tools. Transform your records and knowledge into an asset instead of a source of dread. Find out what it’s like to make informed decisions rather than assumptions by calling 918-734-7215 to book a free appointment.