Digital White Papers

DOCUMENT FACTORIES: BUILDING DOCUMENT AUTOMATION TOOLS the most efficient course may be to automate some portion of a document and leave the remainder for review and manual modification. It is unnecessary to automate documents fully to achieve efficiency gains, particularly if you focus on automating items that benefit from significant leverage between the questions and the potential outcomes. Automating only a few highly leveraged items may still save hours of work, even if additional manual work is required. TESTING AND QUALITY ASSURANCE The time and effort involved in testing and quality assurance can be an underestimated aspect of document automation projects, particularly if testing is required in connection with software upgrades. Careful testing can be critical because end users will expect the document automation tool will work as promised and may not undertake a careful personal review to check for errors. For simple projects, testing can be a fairly quick and straightforward process. However, for documents with more complex automation that includes numerous instances of conditional logic, testing can be a significant endeavor and typically will require the involvement of a subject-matter expert. There can be thousands of permutations in documents that need to be checked. Although document automation development software will have tools to analyze templates for syntax errors and problems with internal logic, it will not have tools to confirm the generated documents will be substantively correct under all permutations or that the formatting of the documents will be correct in the generated documents. Allocate an appropriate amount of time for testing in your project plans. MARKETING AND TRAINING Promoting document automation tools can involve significant challenges. Because document automation is new and may replace long-standing practices, anticipate some skepticism or potential indifference when planning your marketing strategy, particularly among long-tenured individuals. It is therefore important to select projects that will involve a significant incremental improvement over existing practices. Involving subject-matter experts in the project (particularly those who may have a senior role in your department or firm) can create a champion who can help promote use down the road. It can also be helpful to obtain input from a larger group of target users at an early stage to give them some early familiarity with the tools and to help ensure the tools will meet their needs. It is also critical to design the tool so it can be used with no formal training. Any training you offer should be short and available on demand. We offer individualized, on-demand, real-time assistance. This will often get people comfortable enough to try the tool for the first time, which we have found is the biggest hurdle to adoption. Most often, the "training" lasts only a few minutes because the users quickly realize the tool is much easier to use than they initially expected. When providing more formal group training, an effective strategy is to provide document automation training in conjunction with training on the subject to which the document automation tools relate. A well-designed, annotated document automation tool can often serve as an effective structure for providing training on the underlying subject matter. UPDATING Anticipate that documents will need to be updated periodically and have a process in place to handle updates. Your capacity to keep the automated forms updated (and relevant) is as important as your ability to implement them. When building your automation team, involve people likely to stay with your organization to ensure continuity for updates.

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