Digital White Papers

I L T A W H I T E P A P E R | I N F O R M A T I O N G O V E R N E N C E 62 The committee's charter was a major turning point for the project. It allowed us to move from discussing specific detrimental behaviors to looking more broadly at the patterns and underlying reasons why documents were so deeply hidden in front of our own eyes. T O T A L Q U A L I T Y M A N A G E M E N T : C R E A T I N G A C U L T U R E O F S H A R I N G A C R O S S D I V E R S E P R A C T I C E G R O U P S Digging in The committee's charter was a major turning point for the project. It allowed us to move from discussing specific detrimental behaviors to looking more broadly at the patterns and underlying reasons why documents were so deeply hidden in front of our own eyes. To force a further step back and ensure we were looking at the issue as broadly as possible, we developed a twelve question survey focused on document saving and search strategies. Survey We were careful to craft the questions to collect useful information that could highlight habits with objectivity. We used a subscription survey tool and anonymized responses to comfort the respondents no backlash would ensue. However other identifying information was sought to discern patterns among offices, practice groups, and classes of employees. The survey focused on the three types of records: paper email, and electronic documents, and asked questions to gauge both saving and searching strategies of all. Survey compliance and honesty were a minimal concern. There was an 89% completion rate which was due to the ability to track practice group numbers with practice group identification on the survey. Targeted emails and phone calls helped address straggling groups, and accounting for users on leave, we determined statistical validity to be at 75% completion. Results The survey was open for two weeks, and after considerable analysis of the data, we found interesting issues that would not have otherwise come to light. We found that many users did not have proper training in certain capabilities of the system, such as version control, assigning different authorship to a document (as opposed to defaulting to the same author/operator), and users who confused email management with document management. Moving forward Fortuitously, a new training opportunity came to light around the time of the survey analysis. The upgrade from FileSite version 9.3 to iManage Work 10 necessitated re-training of all users in the firm on the new system. This allowed the committee to develop a wish list of top five document management principles every user should learn. These were: Use of Versions Importance of filing email messages regularly and using tools such as linking Outlook folders to the iManage folder and rules for automatic filing The use of document naming conventions for each practice group The importance of not saving work product to personal workspaces Practice group specific doc types 1 2 3 4 5

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