Documents get distributed in the course of business. Internal documents move from one employee to another. Correspondence moves from senders to recipients. Reports get distributed among those interested in the topic. Litigants produce documents to opposing parties and in the court. By paying special attention to the way your document is distributed, you can improve its effectiveness.
1. Business processes typically involve collaborative working, with incidental documents being used to communicate information and for completing the process. Documents get attached to workflows, moving from one person to another until they are finally approved and acted upon.
2. Electronic document management systems have made it possible to pre-define specific workflows and then attach documents to the relevant workflow as soon as it is created. The document will then be routed automatically to persons included in the workflow.
3. Business correspondence can take the forms of postal mail or email. You have to decide which form is best in a particular situation. Emails need not be automatic choice in all cases. They can fail to clear spam filters, or not get opened in time for one reason or other. Postal mail, with certified posting, can prove a better choice in some cases.
4. Business documents like production schedules can even get distributed from one system directly to another, as when the systems are integrated. Such integration can enable suppliers to align their own production to their customer production schedules and ensure timely delivery of needed supplies.
5. Where electronic documents are distributed widely to the public, it becomes important to ensure that all recipients can read them. Documents created using proprietary formats might be unreadable if the recipient does not have the relevant software. Solutions like PDF format and the freely downloadable Adobe Reader that reads PDF documents, help with this issue.
6. Document discovery is a pre-trial litigation procedure in the US. Parties to litigation are obligated to produce documents in support of their contentions. At the same time, they are allowed to remove portions of the document that can harm their case. Considerable care is needed in this context to ensure that such adverse evidence is removed before distributing the documents to opposing attorneys.
7. In due-diligence investigations during M&A or loan negotiations, a company might not be willing to send all documents to the investigators. A typical solution is to make the documents available to them in a physical or virtual data room with restricted access.
8. Electronic documents distributed over the Web might reach the eyes of unauthorized and even malicious eyes. To cope with this risk, documents are often encrypted during transmission. Encrypted documents can be read only by persons who have the de-encryption key.
9. Documents can be locked against further changes so that they do not get changed during a transmission process. This helps authenticate them, ensuring that what the recipient sees is what the sender sent. Programs like Adobe’s Acrobat provide the facility to lock documents and make access to the document password restricted.
Distribution can be seen as the lifeblood that imparts life to documents. Documents become practically dead if they are not circulated. By attending to the logistics of document distribution, it is possible to enhance their effectiveness, and guard against incidental risks.