Today big enterprises (BE) and small medium enterprises (SME) have lots of raw data. These raw data are compiling on daily basis on the machines of knowledge workers (i.e. staffs related to Sales, CRM, and Marketing etc) of the organizations. The reports made by junior manager/executives have tons of extra information that may be discarded as irrelevant for a certain project but may be relevant for some future endeavors. The research made by these executives will be lost once the final version of the document is approved.
First of all very few organizations intend to save all the versions of the documents. Secondly if they have a repository they are not centralized and accessible to others. Also some times these versions are scraped on the individuals PCs once they left the organizations. In our organization (though smaller than any SME in the world) but since it has survived more than 20 years, tons of documents are on individual PCs. Only some documents are saved at centralized machines. But every body in the company starts its new document/research from the scratch. Once when I was assigned to do some research in template driven document generation solutions, I was told that some one in the organization has did this thing 5 years back as well. At that time they were unable to find a reasonable solution. But the documents are not tagged and saved in the centralized repository.
I asked my seniors to check their archived emails if there is any of such document. Once I got this old document my research task become very easy and within 10 days I have come up with a solution. The research had done 5 years back about different products have one of those products who launched a new version later that has solution for us now.
If I would have taken the path of research instead of search it would take me more then 20 to 30 days, but searching our own repository (no where exists yet). I was able to come up with a better solution in fewer days. Then I have lots of time to run each and every scenario on a selected product so that there will be no astonishing realities once we are in the middle of the project.
This is a story of a department where the employee retention is very good. In sales and support department where the rate of employ retention is very low, we should not take any risk of scrapping the documents with employee resignation. The documents sent to some customer may also be required to other customers as well. Here we need a centralized repository with documents tagged by its importance, customers and category. This centralized repository should have enough security claws so management does not feel in secure about the leakage of “confidential” information (though humans are more vulnerable to leak any confidential information).
