To do this, you need to think about the following:

• Who is the target audience for your documents?
• Are there other contributors?
• What are the security requirements and access levels for other users?

If you want to ensure that your company documents are filed in an orderly fashion, it’s important to start with the end in mind. You should know what filing system is currently being used at your firm and make sure that any new document templates or systems fit into this scheme. Once you have a good understanding of how everything fits together, generating company documents will be much easier for everyone involved! So if you need help planning on how best to generate company documentation, make sure you implement the correct document template management system.

User Research and Analysis

Navigation and Hierarchy Creation

Wireframing

Labeling

Taxonomies and Metadata

Data Modeling

You probably don’t spend much time thinking about your information architecture, but it is a critical component of any successful business. Information architecture involves the way you categorize and structure all the content on your website in order to make it easily findable for customers. This post will take you through some basics of what information architecture is and how to implement it successfully on your site. It includes the decisions about which types of content go where and when in an organization’s pages or screens, as well as how they are connected together logically. The goal with IA is to make the process of consuming information as seamless and easy as possible for the information consumer.

At the heart of it, document automation encompasses:

1. Template Management
2. Document Generation
3. Document Management
4. Workflow

In this article, we’ll give you an introduction these four elements:

1. Template Management

Templates are everywhere – fill in a form lately?  That’s a template.  Created a quote? Signed an employment contract? Sent out an NDA? Those are all templates. There’s a good chance that you come across some sort of template every day.

Document automation starts with a template.  To automatically generate a document, you need some base to build the document from.  That’s a template.

Templates are most commonly created in word processing software; where you can define basic placeholders to personalise your document.

You can write whole articles about template management – the key thing to note here is that a template has placeholders (often called ‘variables’) for text, documents, pictures and other things.  To automate the creation of documents, you first create a template.

2. Document Generation

The documents that we create within a business context vary in complexity.  A leave form is very different from a sales proposal or a legal contract.  The information that goes into each document can be as simple as a person’s name or driven by business scenarios and logic.

In document automation, the placeholders in a template are populated to create a document.  The placeholders can be added via manual entry or automatically from a range of sources.   Imagine an employment contract where the placeholders include the employee’s name and personal details plus roles and responsibilities text based on the position.

Sometimes, there are decisions that need to be made about what to include in the document.  This can be done manually or provided by another system.  These rules can make the document automation process very powerful – with opportunities to ensure consistent and also more complex decision-making.

Documents can also be created in different formats.  The most common are ‘word’ documents or PDF.

3. Document Management

Once the document has been created, what happens to it afterwards is just as important.  It can be saved onto your computer, into a network drive or some other file storage system – even printed or emailed.  You might also need people to review and approve the document. Down the track, you may need to archive or delete documents based on your organisation’s retention policy.

All the above activities are part of the document management component of document automation.  What you do with the document is just as important as creating it and managing its lifecycle.

4. Workflow

Workflow defines the steps and processes required for creating a document.  The trigger for document generation can be manually driven (e.g. click of a button) or automatically based on a series of events.  There may also be another series of events for what happens after the document has been created (e.g. editing, reviewing and obtaining approval).

For example – if you are generating a commercial contract, the template may be the starting point for the process.  After the document is generated, there may be additional steps for editing, reviewing and obtaining approval.

The need for system-driven rules (over manual processes) affects the degree of automation for a particular document.  While events after the generation of the document can largely be managed outside of the document automation process, the trigger and decisions for that drive the creation of the document are very much a part of the document automation.

The level of document automation that you need for your business will vary based on the complexity of the document and the processes required to generate it.  Now that you understand the components of document automation, you can start to figure out where your challenges lie and the areas that need attention.

In some cases, the creation of the document is just the first step

This might include some sort of editing, review or approval.

you’ve got to have a template.

Document automation is one of those many buzzwords that end up floating around

Here are two little words that actually covers a lot of things.