RESEARCH STUDY
Finance - The Penalties for Failure The previous three sections paint a clear picture of how productivity can be stifled through poor management of the collaborative process. One clear financial penalty for any company experiencing problems with managing multi-author documents and struggling to complete things on time, is the loss in productivity that these problems create. The time pressure that the document owners are under, based on responses in figure 15, arise from document deadlines. In order to quantify the scale of this issue, we asked how many of the documents in the collaborative network might have delivery deadlines.
So, as we see from figure 18, a high proportion of the documents in circulation at any time have the kind of
Figure 18: What percentage of mission-critical documents have a fixed delivery deadline?
time pressure on them that affects resources, productivity and ultimately, the cost of sharing. The average is around three-quarters of documents in circulation at any given time are working towards a
33%
fixed delivery deadline.
36%
22%
8%
All of them
At least 75%
At least 50%
Less than 50%
We need to think about what sort of documents these might be and, as a consequence, what impact failure to deliver might have. Looking at the sectors from which we drew the sample, they will be legal contracts or submissions, regulatory or compliance logs, corporate finance or equity tenders, or offers and general business proposals. All of which can cause more or less immediate commercial damage if they are simply late arriving, irrespective of how compelling the content.
18
Workshare
™