Did you know that data and information-related problems cost companies more than US$5 million every year?
A 2010 survey by Forbes indicated that 95% of respondents believe that information management is essential to their business success, but only 85% thought their organisations were treating it as a strategic asset.
Directors and business leaders want to deliver profitable work, mitigate risk and ensure that business-critical information is accessible by staff.
Your worst nightmare is having to have an awkward conversation without the relevant information to hand, as it increases risks. A Single Source of Truth is key to your business’ continuity.
With a Single Source of Truth, you can have the ability to produce all emails across any single project or client quicker than ever. It will empower you to make better and more strategic decisions for your business, as you can be confident that you have consistent and complete records within your teams.
Keeping track of all correspondence and having clear audit trails will always benefit your company, and you can have the confidence that you can protect yourself if something does go wrong.
According to the Human Resource Management Review, technology and information management has transformed the way HR processes are currently managed.
You probably already have a Human Resource Information System set up, but what about all the other data you work with and unwittingly collect on a daily basis?
Typically, HR professionals are exchanging sensitive information via email, whether this is to do with salaries, pension or a disciplinary process. Often, you create your own filing structure with folders created on a server for each employee that contains key documents like their employment contract.
Emails with an employee are the kind of thing that often goes unfiled, particularly what has been said to the employee, but by the time it is important to have access to this information, it can be difficult, or even too late.
With a Single Source of Truth, HR teams can ensure all important documents and correspondence pertaining to each employee are filed away, and you aren’t left with a disorganised and overflowing inbox.
You’ll benefit from a clear record of every HR conversation with an employee so it’s easy to see when a job role has changed, what was agreed, or what was discussed in their last appraisal.
If someone is on annual leave but you’re following up on a conversation with their client, you will be able to track down their latest correspondence, plus internal documentation and policy announcements can be easily monitored to drive accountability for new process adoption.
IT leaders are tasked with solving many challenges, from evaluating cyber risk, delivering digital transformation, maintaining the business infrastructure, all the way to keeping overheads low.
Plus, when things go wrong, everyone comes to you to solve their problems, regardless of whether it’s a dispute, retrieving information, lost data or something else.
In fact, 78% of IT professionals in 2015 reported that their jobs were stressful, and more than 80% worked more than 3-hours of overtime in an average week. Can you relate?
The modern technology landscape and working world has meant that organisations have needed to adopt digital transformation rapidly, and this challenge falls onto your shoulders.
With a Single Source of Truth, you can mitigate the risks of losing critical data overnight.
By implementing the right tools and processes, you can decrease the amount of email overload faced by your colleagues, improve their productivity drains and increase overall visibility, ensuring you don’t need to spend hours digging through current and ex-employee's inboxes to find one email ever again.
Ensuring that a Single Source of Truth framework is adhered to in your company means that all information is stored in a centralised folder, removing risks of emails and other information being undiscoverable in individual inboxes, reducing inbox storage space and improving overall team collaboration.
You can boost your cybersecurity knowing that all information is securely filed away, easily discover data, and implement privileged access management solutions that reflect your company’s objectives.
Plus, you can avoid the risk of fines and reputation damage by ensuring you can maintain better audit trails with project and client correspondence being sorted in the most appropriate locations.
Project Managers and PMOs are no stranger to the project nightmares that plague companies. Additional costs caused by rework have a huge impact on your project’s performance and value, with 80% of project professionals spending half of their time on rework.
But with a Single Source of Truth, you can increase collaboration and productivity, make more informed decisions and spend less time searching for information.
With the mass-move to digital, it has never been easier to keep track of commercially sensitive information and being able to effectively capture and manage all correspondence and ensuring information is discoverable and accessible by all is vital.
Unfortunately, you may have noticed that there’s a communication chasm between project teams and their senior executive teams, as higher-ups are continually frustrated when they are not kept in the loop on a project’s status. This negatively impacts a project’s engagement, and often, this frustration surrounds their want for the information they need, when they need it.
Most of the information senior executives need is buried in the emails or document management systems of project teams, and because of inconsistent filing, the information they are looking for is often incomplete.
By moving towards a Single Source of Truth model, project teams can avoid delays, reworks and reduce project risks by ensuring that nobody is left out of the project communication loop.
When project management is done well, adhering to the Single Source of Truth, you will see productivity gains, money saved in disputes, improved client service, reduced admin cost, increased fees, stronger compliance, and a holistic document and records management.
Quality Assurance and Compliance Officers can wear many hats, but risk management is a critical component of your role.
The standardisation of processes, whether relating to an on-site activity, document control or the organisation of project information are all linked to a reduction in money spend on claims, and ultimately lead to your business being more successful.
Your role is frequently cited as the driver for a company’s information management strategy, as compliance and QA issues represent the biggest potential risks to your organisation.
One of the biggest challenges for you is that you know which of your colleagues are unlikely to follow document and email filing & naming processes that are required.
This makes your ISO audit more stressful than it needs to be, as you’re left hoping projects these colleagues are working on aren’t selected for the audit.
There is no substitute for a proactive approach to QA and compliance management, and a Single Source of Truth can transform your role.
First, you can ensure that all emails are treated like any other form of documentation in that it’s filed, retrievable and consistently titled.
You can be less reliant on your colleagues filing information to the correct project and to name files correctly, and you can point your audit assessor in the right direction, rather than to a document explaining what people ‘should do’.
Finance teams are usually the first to adopt technology in any business, and information is the lifeblood of the industry.
Despite the power your team’s information holds, only 16% of decision-makers feel as though financial data can be easily leveraged for decision making, and a huge reason for this is that it is held in silos and not easily accessible.
Most firms, regardless of industry, have an accounting system in place where invoicing is managed as a bare minimum. Being able to track when invoices are sent is critical, and this is often a primary part of your role, but it presents its own challenges.
The first being that your team are the only one’s accessing this system, and second, any credit control correspondence is usually an informal process of chasing emails that are stored in the Finance Manager’s inbox.
With a Single Source of Truth, finance teams can gain clear transparency of when invoices have been sent, chased, and importantly, who they have been sent to.
It will provide you with an immediate view of the conversations that have taken place regarding the payment of an invoice, and if there have been any negotiated terms or exceptions agreed upon, you will have access to the broader conversations that have happened between that client and your colleagues.
And this increased transparency and visibility of your information has real-time benefits too. A-Team Group reported that by focusing on their data and information management, a client reported 45% direct cost savings from improved transparency.
Especially post-COVID, the role of an Office Manager has changed immensely. On any day, your role might look like an information-filing sheriff, point of contact for a client, HR, finance and a QA manager all in one.
Plus, you’re one of the first people your colleague’s go-to when they can’t find the information they are looking for. You spend roughly 20% of your workweek searching for this information when you could be doing more pertinent tasks.
With a Single Source of Truth, you can ensure complete visibility across the business of the information you need to respond to queries from leadership and provide information as and when it’s needed.
You’ll be able to file all your business’ critical correspondence and ensure that all employee information relating to projects and clients, or processes is captured, and you can retain all colleagues’ emails in a way that is organised and valuable for teams and clients alike.
The push to collaborate and change construction methods have never been more significant. There have been huge changes to the industry, especially since 2011 when the UK government mandated that all government-funded building projects use BIM. This has been a catalyst in accelerating the importance of information management in both sectors.
I’m sure you’ve seen that you are generating more information than ever on a typical construction project, and much of this data is unstructured and poorly coordinated.
With a Single Source of Truth, you can eradicate waste, reduce risk, and save on costs by recording and storing all information in a logical manner.
Plus, according to PCB Today, through proper adoption of information management and a Single Source of Truth, every £1 of direct productivity gain today in the design, construction and maintenance of built assets could potentially translate into £3.70 in annual UK GDP in 2051.
BIM is about working smarter and challenging what the industry has always done, so it’s time to consider where your key project information is stored that you may need to rely on in the future, including documents, data sheets, common data environments, contracts, inboxes and more.
Including email in your Single Source of Truth is vital as it contains the context to projects, and when this is stored in a centralised repository, you can make better decisions to deliver better, safer projects, and have less reliance on masses of information you currently store in spreadsheets.