Email killing your teamwork? Perhaps document management is the fix (infographic)

Document management firm Knowledge Tree thinks email is killing teamwork … and making document creation more difficult, longer, and more frustrating than it needs to be.

Almost all documents — a full 94 percent — require teamwork, according to Knowledge Tree, and the traditional email-it-around-for-changes merry-go-round isn’t cutting it anymore, according to the company.

In fact, 63 percent of documents require between three and five revisions, 20 percent are changed between five and 10 times, and an astonishing six percent of documents are revised more than 11 times.

I think most of us in the business world have been on the receiving end of those emails. The result is that only one in four people think that it is easy to get colleagues’ feedback.

Not surprisingly, the document management company believes that a document management solution is a better option. Document management systems make communication more visible, a company spokesman told me, giving teams comprehensive knowledge of what’s happening.

Document management also gives companies insights into business process.

“We hear that businesses need to organize documents based on rich metadata, like by business unit, geography, product line, date delivered, and more,” a company representative told me. “They need to get insight into these documents based on the way their business is organized.  You can’t value an asset your team doesn’t know it has.”

A good solution for creating shared documents might also result in … more sharing.

Currently only one in four people think that it is easy to get colleagues’ feedback. Most of them — 59 percent — share documents via email, while another seven percent use hard copy, and 5 percent simply skip the painful process entirely.

Here’s the infographic:

photo credit: kk+ via photopin cc