Document-less workplace
What are documents used for?
- A letter
- A design
- A set of instructions
- A form
- A report
- A policy
- A legal agreement
- A brochure
- A checklist
- A flowchart
- A set of requirements
The list is nearly end-less. At one time, they were all printed on paper before being distributed to the consumer to be read, filled in or followed.
In the digital age I see no need to print any documents in the workplace. Printed paper still has its place - I'd rather read from a book than an eReader any day and the workplace printer still gets used for printing timetables to be pinned to walls, and the occasional music score for my son to follow on the piano.
The first step in the evolution of the document was the PDF or the Word document. Yes, I know there were other formats before them but these are living fossils. They're produced digitally and often distributed and consumed digitally too. Most people have the ability to edit a Word document which makes version control a nightmare. How do you know you have the latest version with all the updates that have been added by various people? PDFs regain some of that control the flexibility of an editable document is lost.
Online, collaborative editing of documents in Office 365 and Google Docs is a bit of a game changer. You can have one master document in a shared online repository. I find it unfortunate though that Google Docs has become an online editor of what are essentially Word documents, such is the pervasiveness of the Microsoft product. There was an opportunity to revolutionise the document creation process and environment, but even features like pageless mode seem hemmed in by the vestiges of an A4 based past. Much needed features such as versioning, review and authorisation control are ill-thought out bolt-ons rather than embedded ways of working that everyone can get behind. If you want to share a document with someone who doesn't use Office 365 or Google Workspace you have to download it as... you've guessed it - a Word or PDF document.
There is the web, but HTML documents are still linear and the CSS skills required to wrangle blocks into different positions on the page are out of reach of the ordinary layperson.
Wikis and their online editors are a revolution, but again, version control and review and authorisation require third party proprietary systems.
There are online forms like Survey Monkey and Google Forms but the information they collect ends up in silos. Imagine if any data collated from a user over any period of time could be found in one place.
Can we remove the need for any documents altogether? We should certainly try. One goal of IT should be to do away with documents and break down information into smaller, re-usable components.
Letters have been replaced almost 100% by email, which itself is losing out a fair proportion of business to instant messaging.
Great user interfaces should be self explanatory and shouldn't need a supporting guide. Tool tips and help guides can be embedded in digital forms.
Requirements should be documented in a ticketing tool that can handle the full lifecycle from request through to approval (or rejection) to implementation to decommissioning. A single, searchable store of truth by anyone in the business.
Designs shouldn't sit in isolation in a single document. They should form part of a single view of the enterprise.
ERP and CRM systems should be flexible enough to collate data from user designed forms, giving a single view of a given colleague, customer or supplier.
Reports are static. Users want interactive dashboards that they can manipulate and see from different viewpoints.
Maybe legal documents and policies will always find a home in the humble document, but processes and procedures should continuously evolve to improve and would be far better off documented in a Wiki, written in a transportable markup language, such as Markdown.
I long for a document-less workplace and anywhere I see one being used I try to look for an alternative, but sadly, the technology we use across businesses just isn't up to the job yet.
