Problems HowNow® Solves

The Email Problem

• The volume of emails received by businesses has grown out of control and continues to grow exponentially. From 1997 to 2001 email traffic has grown 215 times (times, not percent) and has again trebled in the past 3 years.
• Many emails contain important information and must be stored in case they need to be retrieved in the future.
• Many organisations run fragmented email systems where sent and received emails are stored locally on staff computers (e.g. in Microsoft® Outlook PST files) and central storage of emails on to the network is done on an ad hoc basis, if at all.
• Emails have now become important documents in litigation cases. Organisations not only need to be able to retrieve emails but they need to be able to do so in a way that is quick, easy and not at all disruptive or costly to the organisation.

- Important Questions to Ask Yourself -  

The Document Management Problem

• Your firm creates many thousands of documents each year.
• Efficiency in creating, storing, sending and retrieving these documents greatly impacts upon your firm due to the sheer volume of documents and the time it takes staff to create and later retrieve these documents.
• Efficiently managing these documents without a centralised and database-driven document management system is impossible.

Statistics from PricewaterhouseCoopers:

• 40% of a knowledge worker's time is spent looking for documents. That equates to two days each week. Are you happy for your staff to start their productive week on Wednesday?
• $20 is the average cost of filing each document.
• The average organisation loses one out of every 20 documents.
• $120 is the average cost of searching for a misfiled document.

These are costs incurred, not merely the lost opportunity cost of that time.

Statistics from The Gartner Group:

• 90% of a business' information resides in documents, not databases.
• 80% of data stored in a PC-networked environment is stored in local hard drives (individuals' computers) rather than centrally stored on the local-area network.
• $180 is the average per-document cost of recreating a document or template when a known-to-exist version cannot be found.
• $150 is the average cost of processing a simple intra-company form such as a leave request.

- Important Questions to Ask Yourself -  

The Knowledge Management Problem

• Much of your organisation's knowledge about the way things are done within your organisation resides in the brains of your staff.
• Your organisation invests in the training of your staff to develop their 'This is the way we do things here' knowledge, both through formal training and inherent on-the-job training.
• This extremely valuable knowledge walks in your office door at the start of each day, and at the end of each day walks out. Some days, it doesn't come back.
• When staff leave, that knowledge is lost to the firm, so you hire a replacement and the training and induction process starts all over again. It's a vicious cycle.
• Much of the implicit knowledge that your staff have about 'This is the way we do things here' could be documented into procedures, checklists, templates and other company documentation.
• However, documenting knowledge into explicit systems is easier said than done. For many firms, documenting systems and procedures remains 'important, not urgent' and therefore never gets done to a satisfactory level, despite the obvious benefits.
• A highly systemised business is easier to manage, less stressful and more rewarding to work in, more valuable and is ready for sale or succession.

- Important Questions to Ask Yourself -