Millennia Group Blog

It’s completely acceptable and a lot of fun each year to take some risks and place some bets when the Kentucky Derby is run.  The riskiness of the horse you choose is usually based on a personal hunch, minimal research or discussions with a spouse, family or friends.  The amount of loss is known up front and may or may not have anything to do with the riskiness of the horse selected.

If only all risk assessment was so easy.  When you look at real life risk assessment as it relates to your company’s information assets, it’s a very complicated issue.  Here are some basic points that should be considered when trying to protect (aka mitigate risk to) your information assets like documents and data.  Avoiding a data breach is a bet that you really want to win.

Normally we don’t do a blog post on a Friday, but since this is Friday the 13^th it seems like a good time to remind everyone that document disasters can happen any day.  The cause of these disasters is usually us and we can screw up today or any day.  So be careful, be diligent and try to be organized.    

What are the typical disasters that can happen?  Accidental deletion of a document, a file dragged and dropped into the abyss, version nightmares ie. V1, V2, V998 and counting, files that are too large to email or upload or download, and on and on. 

It seems simple to envision the tools required by a mobile worker.  The basics quickly jump to mind including a phone, a laptop, chargers of course and a Starbucks or Panera card.  Then you need a location, which could include a home office, an office suites membership or the aforementioned coffee shop.

The real tools of the trade are more software oriented.  It’s critical to have a fully cloud based infrastructure or a VPN that provides access to your CRM, accounting system/ERP, messaging app, email and of course documents.  The emergence of technology and the disappearance of ledger books, the Rolodex and filing cabinets resulted in amazing efficiency gains.  Now that these tools are also available to mobile users, has efficiency peaked?

Okay, maybe security shaming is not the proper way to describe security awareness training.  No matter how its labeled, it’s working.  We don’t receive emails with employee or patient lists attached.  We aren’t given access to a Box account where we can see all company information instead of only the one folder we should see.

More and more we recognize the need to share information in a secure manner.  Nobody wants to be the one who accidently released a million names and social security numbers.  Security awareness training, a standard ritual now at most companies, is effective at helping to prevent accidental releases, but ensuring that information is securely shared could be a lot easier.

We serve clients in many different industries; commercial real estate, manufacturing, insurance, telecommunications, non-profit, education, etc.  Each one of these industries has some critical information that drives the company or certainly a significant department within the company. 

Most of the time that critical information is data that is pulled from or supported by documents.  Lease agreements and other contracts contain the terms and conditions that feed the accounting system.  Customer orders contain the all-important customer information that goes into the ERP.  Unorganized, mis-filed, inaccessible documents result in inaccurate data.

There are many examples of human endeavors that would not have ended well without training.  Moon shots, marathon running, heart surgery and triple axles (not 100% sure what that is) are just a few that come to mind.  But don’t just think of training as necessary only to achieve super human feats. 

Training is one concrete way to maximize the value of your software investments, a more mundane but very worthwhile goal.  It doesn’t matter what type of software it is, if users don’t use it (out of fear) or use it incorrectly, the investment will not pay off – aka, Failure.  That failure can be avoided with well thought out training.

At some point in our working careers most of us have planted our initials on some form or memo to signify our approval.  Yes, I agree that purchasing this $1mm piece of equipment is a good idea – MC.  It’s not a legal issue such as when a contract requires a full signature, but it does indicate that we take responsibility for or acknowledge the contents of a document.  There is a justified need for the initials.

The legitimacy of digital signatures for legal documents has been debated in the Supreme Court and every major country in the world.  Software solutions exist and thrive providing secure digital signatures that comply with the law.  This is all positive for our economy as it makes business processes more efficient.  Here is a little hint – there’s a lot of bang for the buck replacing ink on internal forms with digital initials.

There is no denying that many businesses absolutely need automation in order to get to that next level of efficiency.  Unfortunately, large companies with large budgets drove the development of most automation solutions and therefore, those solutions are very complex.

This legacy complexity creates an actual and perceived barrier to implementation.  Small to medium businesses (“SMB”) don’t have the training and support resources, nor the cash runway to implement and achieve the promised benefits from automation.  But SMBs, don’t be deterred, there are automation solutions that will fit your budget, workforce and customer needs.

For over 20 years our company has been providing services and solutions to the commercial real estate industry.  It’s a very large industry.  Depending on which stats you read, the U.S. commercial real estate industry is valued at over $15 Trillion dollars and growing by almost $70 Billion a year.  That is the size of the U.S. stock market. 

The commercial real estate industry is also very complicated.  It consists of developers, investors, advisors, managers, brokers and lenders.  These parties form partnerships, joint ventures, REITs, TICs and dozens of ownership structures.  And all these interested parties can be involved in a single property and they all have one thing in common - they have a copy of the same lease document.  At least it should be the same document.

If it’s a common refrain in your company that nobody can find anything on the file server or in the document management system, you are not alone.  In many cases a company believes this is because they have a digital document organization problem or possibly the lack of a document czar. 

Just because a company is not staffed entirely with former librarians doesn’t mean that a lack of organization is the only problem.  There may be other factors at play, like for instance, rapid growth or a string of acquisitions.  However, what’s really missing might be a document collection strategy.