Variability to the Rescue of Your Complex Document Ecosystems
Many organizations often come to the same conclusion: their customers and employees operate in a complex digital and document-based environment. This complexity hinders their productivity… and causes a great deal of frustration.
Complexity is therefore everywhere: not only in legal documents, such as contracts, but also in a wide range of governance, administrative, and organizational management documents. Examples include codes of ethics, policies, guidelines, and forms related to human resources processes. These documents are not always easy for their intended audience to understand; they pile up and become jumbled. This can be a headache for many and provides the impetus needed to structure and optimize document management so that everyone can finally navigate them with ease.
Customize and redesign the user experience to make it more intuitive
So it’s not just a matter of simplifying the documents: The key is often to address the broader context in which they exist.
Take, for example, financial services or telecommunications contracts. These contracts are often generic and not tailored to each specific situation, which discourages customers from reading and understanding them. Customer service representatives, for their part, are overwhelmed with questions.
This is where the concept of variability comes into play, leveraging the possibilities offered by digital technology and UX design: by developing a flexible contract that adapts to the customer’s situation. Essentially, this involves personalizing content so that users see only the information that is relevant to them. This approach to simplifying content helps prevent information overload and, consequently, confusion.
Internal processes are also under scrutiny
To address the lack of customization in certain documents they use, some organizations create multiple versions. For example, an employment contract may come in several versions, and the human resources manager must select the version that best fits the new employee’s situation.
As a result, internal document management processes can sometimes become veritable mazes for employees, who waste a tremendous amount of time trying to navigate them. For example, every topic or clause that appears repeatedly across documents often has to be updated manually. This repetitive task is often a source of errors. In an effort to address the complexity stemming from a lack of customization, we unfortunately create another problem—this time related to document management and updates.
Embracing process automation can therefore significantly help reduce paperwork, prevent numerous errors, eliminate redundant information, and avoid inconsistencies. This allows employees to focus on tasks that add greater value.
For example, it’s easy to imagine a human resources department that handles a wide range of situations on a daily basis, such as retirements, new hires, or layoffs. For these professionals, each situation may be linked to a separate document, each of which can be tailored to the employee’s specific circumstances. Structuring and developing customizable questionnaires or forms—which can be filled out by both the human resources department and the employees themselves—can greatly simplify the work of the teams responsible for using these documents, while minimizing the risk of errors.
A World of Possibilities
The use of variability offers numerous opportunities for automation, making it possible to eliminate certain tasks that are traditionally performed manually. For example, it is possible to reuse existing data in systems to automatically pre-fill certain questionnaires, thereby avoiding the need to ask the same person for the same information multiple times.
The applications are therefore almost endless and very practical:
Imagine a world where the bidding process is simplified and doctors spend less time filling out paperwork?
At En Clair, we have the expertise to analyze your document corpora, carefully merge sensitive content, and create matrices with variables that give you a comprehensive view of what the new user experience you’re offering your customers or employees might look like.
Does this pique your curiosity (and are you looking for simplicity)?