Content and document management is essential for success in the Professional and Technical Services industries due to the highly specialized nature of the work and the critical role that information plays in these sectors.
These industries often involve complex projects that require the collaboration of multiple stakeholders, such as architects, engineers, consultants, and clients. Efficient document management systems ensure that all parties have access to accurate, up-to-date information, which is crucial for making informed decisions and maintaining project timelines.
As well, these industries are subject to strict regulatory requirements and must maintain comprehensive documentation to demonstrate compliance. A robust document management system helps organizations to efficiently store, track, and retrieve essential records, reducing the risk of non-compliance and enhancing overall operational efficiency.
In addition, effective document management promotes knowledge sharing and continuity across teams, enabling organizations to capitalize on collective expertise and drive innovation.
Here are some of the challenges that affect these industries, and how FormKiQ can solve these challenges:
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Volume and Complexity of Information:
These industries generate vast amounts of data and documents throughout the lifecycle of a project. Managing this information can be difficult, especially when dealing with multiple file formats, revisions, and contributors.
FormKiQ is built to manage any number of documents, backed by the most reliable and cost-effective cloud storage available, Amazon S3. In addition to that storage, FormKiQ provides various features to organize and classify documents, including optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent document processing (IDP), and enables easy document search and recall using a combination of full-text and tag-based search functionality.
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Regulatory Compliance:
Professional and Technical Services industries are often subject to strict regulations and standards. Ensuring that all documentation meets these requirements and is readily available for audits can be time-consuming and complex.
FormKiQ is designed to meet the rigors of the Amazon Web Services Well-Architected Framework, with one of its major pillars being security. By relying on battle-tested AWS technologies that meet compliance through rigourous cerfications and controls such as FedRamp and NIST 800-53, and by enabling encryption in-transit and at-rest, FormKiQ reduces the risk of security issues, unauthorized access, and data breaches.
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Access Control, Data Security, and Privacy:
Protecting sensitive information and maintaining client confidentiality are paramount in these industries. Implementing robust security measures to prevent unauthorized access, data breaches, and loss of information can be challenging, especially when collaborating with external partners.
FormKiQ not only provides encryption in-transit and at-rest, it also enables granular access controls through user management, multi-site partitions, and both role- and attribute-based access control options. FormKiQ is built using the principles of least privilege and security by design.
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Collaboration, Communication, and Version Control:
As these industries often involve multi-disciplinary teams working together, efficient collaboration and communication are crucial. Ensuring that all team members have access to the most recent and relevant documentation can be challenging, particularly when working across different time zones or locations. It is also essential for many professional and technical service providers that they have some form of document control to reduce the risk of errors due to out-of-date information or documents being shared or published without proper review and approval.
FormKiQ provides integration betweens systems and disparate file storage solutions, enabling FormKiQ to maintain storage and management of the Document of Record, or provide connectivity with an alternative primary document repository. FormKiQ also enables access to Office365, Google Drive, and other productivity and online storage tools.
For version control, FormKiQ includes version history powered by Amazon S3 Versions, and also enables document control procedures, such as requiring a document controller, providing legal hold functionality, and allowing for document expiry.
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Knowledge Retention and Transfer:
As these industries are knowledge-intensive, retaining and transferring expertise between team members and across projects is crucial. However, ensuring that valuable insights and lessons learned are documented and easily accessible can be a challenge.
FormKiQ includes functionality to collaborate on creating documentation and other forms or knowledge transfer, while providing the organizational and discovery tools to ensure that the available information is easy for others to find. As well, FormKiQ's robust integration features enable connection to wikis and applications like Notion.
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Legacy Systems and Integration:
Implementing a new document management system may require integration with existing software and tools, which can be complex and resource-intensive.
FormKiQ is designed for integration and interoperability, with its API-First design and by providing source code for its Core and, with some restrictions, its Enterprise offerings. FormKiQ's actions and workflows allow for robust control of documents and data as they move in and through FormKiQ and interact with other systems. FormKiQ also provides custom authentication with SAML and other SSO options, and can enable standardization of access controls, whether role-based or attribute-based.
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Training and User Adoption:
Ensuring that all staff members are adequately trained to use document management systems effectively and consistently can be a challenge, particularly in industries characterized by high employee turnover or diverse skill sets.
FormKiQ not only provides documentation and support, but we can work with your existing project documentation and support processes to ensure a consistent training and support model between your software and FormKiQ's document management functionality.
As well, FormKiQ provides a user interface as part of its web console, designed according to usability principles and in step with other thoughtful file and document management products. This interface can be customized or even cannibalized as desired, with options to copy code, fork the repository, or deployed as-is and tailored with specific configuration options.
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Scalability:
As organizations grow and technology advances, document management systems must be able to scale and evolve to meet increasing demands and adapt to new trends, making it a challenge to maintain long-term effectiveness.
FormKiQ is built with scalability as a primary goal, using Amazon Web Services and its serverless and managed services to ensure the best results in scaling for both increases and decreases in usage. This scalable design not only allows the application to keep pace with higher usage, it also allows for non-prod and test environments to run with minimal required resources and creates efficiency in times of reduced usage, such as seasonal lulls.
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Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity:
Ensuring that document management systems have effective disaster recovery and business continuity plans in place is crucial to minimize downtime and protect vital information in the event of system failures, natural disasters, or cyber-attacks.
FormKiQ uses infrastructure and products from Amazon Web Services, which are known for their reliability and high availability. As well, we provide professional services to help organizations determine the appropriate disaster recovery and business continuity preparation to put in place.
For more information on disaster recovery and business continuity using Amazon Web Services, you can review the Disaster Recovery section of the AWS Well-Architected Framework Whitepaper, or contact us for a consultation.
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Cost and Resource Constraints:
Implementing, maintaining, and upgrading document management systems can be expensive, and organizations must carefully weigh the costs against the benefits to determine the most efficient and effective solutions for their specific needs.
FormKiQ uses the most cost-effective cloud storage, Amazon S3, which offers intelligent tiering functionality; this handles the largest expense most document management incurs, which is the storage costs of a large volume of documents. All other components of FormKiQ make use of services and architectures that incur cost for actual usage only, ensuring that there is no wasted capacity.
In addition, FormKiQ includes the support of cloud and software engineering experts, with additional professional services available from our team as required, ensuring that a lack of in-house expertise will not prevent your organization from building the perfect document management system for its needs.
FormKiQ was specifically created to empower organizations to increase their document management capabilities in a flexible and customizable way that matches the growth and specific focus of each organization.
Contact us to discuss how FormKiQ can reduce document management, process, and workflow agony for your organization.