I started working at IntraLinks earlier this year and began my first day, as new employees generally do, by reading everything on the company intranet site, meeting with key team members and my manager to understand the goals and priorities for online marketing as well as key challenges for this year.

In today’s world, we are required to process more information from an increasing number of sources in order to make sound decisions. How can we survive this information avalanche?

Organize your information

Both professionals and consumers alike tend to organize their digital information in hierarchies because computer filing systems impose a hierarchical structure of folders. Document location serves as the main organizing principle. Additional restrictions — e.g. a document should appear in only one location — then forces users to come up with strict categorization of document types.

Although a systematic filing structure potentially makes information more accessible, studies of real-world document collections show that categorization schemas are far less stable. Problems generally fall into the following categories:

Earlier this year, we worked on an exciting project to significantly expand IntraLinks’ existing document protection feature. It goes beyond securing Adobe PDF documents to securing all types of Microsoft Office files both inside and outside the firewall. This kind of project, which allowed us to apply new technology to pressing business problems, was interesting to work on and was extremely useful to our clients – more than 15,000 of our users have protected their documents since this spring.

As a business professional, I fend off hundreds of emails in a day with various weapons of choice like my BlackBerry or my company laptop. (One recent report estimates the average person sends and receives 133 email messages a day!) Yet just when I think I'm winning the "Battle of the (email) Bulge" by diligently responding, filing, and deleting, I realize mine is a pyrrhic victory. The corporate paper trail I deal with extends well beyond email, piling up in reams of documents that clutter our desks, filing cabinets, faxes, and printers.

The real war against document proliferation is going on right in front of us: on the desktop (the physical one, not the virtual one). A recent study by the Association for Information and Image Management (AAIM) shows that the average professional photocopies a single document 19 times. Multiply that by the estimated 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. that are growing at a rate of 22% per year and you have quite a pile of paper to manage.

Virtually every business has large volumes of documents — from expense reports and purchase orders to travel requests — that flow through a work process. In a traditional workflow, each document routes through one department to the next, where an employee manually evaluates the information for review or further action. Many of these tasks are repetitive and time-consuming, yet vital to businesses that require detailed records be kept. Accurately tracking a document's progress from its originator to its final destination is known as document workflow management.