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- If the original owner leaves, no one is sure who has the next best "official original".
- When a group is responsible for editing portions of the document, no one is aware of the changes made by the others until it is all integrated and shared.
- When finished, no one knows where to store the finished copy, except that the current owner has it in their inbox somewhere.
- If a document is a living document -- ike the operating plan, say -- updates are not possible except by some process of contacting the owner, asking for a change to be made, and then expecting the owner to continute to keep track of the new original.
- Because the above is so unwieldy, it just doesn't happen. The result is that the document quickly no longer reflects how things really are, and becomes a management burden to update when, every so often, it becomes important to have that document match reality (as at quarterly report time).
Proposed Outcomes of a new style of work
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- "The System" keeps the definitive master copy of the document. Not any particular person's inbox.
- Changes to a shared document can be made by anyone in the group; changes are tracked and can be revoked;
What documents do we have group responsibility for now?
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Interactivity is a forcing factor. The Budgets and Forecasts area is represented with a complex set of layered spreadsheets, which only work when the formulas in one sheet are actively updating from data in other sheets. Rolling up linkages among these sheets are greatly enhanced by storage in a single file tree.
Compatibility is a forcing factor. If, say, the CSS portion of the quarterly report needs to be able to merge into the same master document as other directorates, then we need to be able to convert, at least, form the group-edit format