The Google platform is a fantastic and basically free option to use as a collaboration and productivity tool within a business. My company uses it. It's been key in enabling the flow of ideas, the sharing and storage of information, and collaboration. But, our mantra of "just throw it in google doc" is now becoming a tangled web of one-off information and difficult to find resources.
The first step to taming the beast is recognizing that this will happen. With so much freedom to spin up and share information it can quickly get out of hand. What good is a doc or spreadsheet if no one can find it? Here are two ways to get and keep your info organized:
Consolidate documents through a Google Site
At an enterprise level use the Google Sites feature to logically organize information and create a portal. Google Sites is an entire topic in and of it's own, but you can very quickly build a site that can simply serve as the launch pad for all of your information. The site ties all the random docs together and can be organized in a way that makes sense for your organization. We use a site as the foundation for our company intranet. The information architecture is organized by department. All the relevant google docs for a department are categorized as links within the portal. This has been a handy reference tool particularly in the on-boarding of new employees. We also leave the site permissions open so that anyone can add more links to docs. We've virtually eliminated the need for sophisticated system administration and content management. Although lightweight governance over the site is recommended so that we don't end up with another problem - a disjointed information architecture
Leverage Personalization Capabilities
At the individual level, you can create folders and labels to logically organize documents in a way that makes sense to you. This feature is called Collections. The google documents view allows each person to create their own filing system structure for finding docs. This personalized approach to managing info is more powerful than it may seem on the surface. Think about it, in traditional environment someone else manages the directory structure and naming convention of a shared drive or LAN. They've already decided how information should be organized in terms that make sense to them. We've got a company shared drive too for docs that are required to be static. And guess what, the biggest complaint is that people cant find what they are looking for. This nuisance actually creates a bigger issue when people take things into their own hands and start storing their own versions of documents locally or wasting time trying to find then emailing documents around to each other. Organizing our google docs in my own terms changed my world. While it's simple enough to just do a search to find the right document, categorizing docs keeps all related items together and let's you quickly locate information related together but kept in separate documents.
How are you using the google platform for your business? If you want to more about how to strategically use the Google platform, contact me.
No comments:
Post a Comment