From chaos to order: How we helped a charitable organization fix it’s information management system
Snapshot
One of the world’s most prominent charitable organizations came to us with a problem: Staff were unfamiliar with the tools the organization used to manage documents securely.
Employees created their own improvised solutions, which involved unsafe practices that put the organization’s data at risk of theft or fraud. It also made it hard to track information. As part of this organization’s efforts to reform these practices, Kalles Group developed a series of tutorials and activities for the org’s employees, including one-on-one sessions, showing them how to manage documents properly using the org’s tools. We also created a central database where all employees could quickly access the info they needed. The results were very encouraging: Among the pilot group with whom we ran these sessions, compliance rose significantly. This project also gave us the opportunity to showcase our flexibility in the face of changing customer needs.
Challenge
We needed to find a way to inform this organization’s many staffers about the right way to share and store data, and about the security risks and lost productivity that comes from doing things the wrong way.
For instance, employees were sending sensitive information to outside parties as email attachments, when the proper procedure was to provide a link to the document, hosted on a secure server. Employees were also using Dropbox and Google apps for storing and sharing information in a way that was not authorized by the organization. This meant the org couldn’t track when and how data was being shared – a major security risk. This organization came to Kalles Group, asking us to be part of the effort to solve this problem. To do so, we needed an in-depth understanding of the organization’s tools and how they were to be used.
Approach
We opened lines of communication with the organization’s change manager, who was responsible for reforming document management practices, as well as with the org’s business systems analysts, to learn about the specific problems they were having in managing documents. Based on those discussions, we created a road map to document compliance. This involved running tutorials and activities for a pilot group of employees, as well as helping to build resources where employees could quickly and easily access what they need to know about document policy.
Results
Let’s face it: Learning about document management isn’t very exciting, and after some time, we found that employee engagement in the pilot project was low. So we pivoted to a new approach: We had frank discussions with the org’s representatives about the challenges we were facing with our part of the organization’s reform efforts. We engaged the organization’s leadership to ensure that they backed our efforts. We “divided and conquered” — specific tasks were given to various individuals at the organization to ensure that employees were engaged in the process of learning document management.