- 14 | 10 | 2025
I was in a client meeting two weeks ago, I won’t name names, but think FTSE 250, highly regulated sector and the COO looked me straight in the eye and said, “We’ve got Microsoft 365 everywhere, but somehow nobody can find anything.”
It hit me because I have heard almost exactly the same from several clients recently. Different industries, different sizes, but the same fundamental frustration.
If you’re are reading this and nodding along, you’re are not alone. Most organisations are not struggling because they lack electronic document management systems – they’ve have got too many of them. SharePoint Online here, some legacy EDRMS there, departmental records management workarounds everywhere. Everyone’s is making it work, sort of.
But here’s is the thing that keeps me up at night: we’ve have accidentally created the very problem we were trying to solve.
Look, we all know about the productivity stats. McKinsey says employees spend nearly two hours every day just searching for information. That’s is almost 10 hours a week. But honestly,? Those numbers feel abstract until you watch it happen.
Last month I observed a client’s project review where half the meeting was spent trying to locate the latest version of a contract. Four different people had four different versions. The actual decision we needed to make took ten minutes. Finding the right document took thirty.
That is the reality most leaders are living with. It is not just lost time, it is the missed opportunities, the duplicated work, the nagging doubt about whether you’re are looking at the right information when making big decisions. And frankly, it is getting worse.
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over 80%
of Microsoft 365 users say they only use a fraction of its document management capabilities.
(Source: Gartner / AIIM 2024)
If you have already invested in Microsoft 365, you are sitting on the bones of a proper enterprise document management system. You just haven’t assembled the skeleton yet.
I keep meeting senior leaders who think they need to rip everything out and start fresh with a new EDRMS. That is usually because someone’s sold them on the latest shiny electronic document and records management system or because they think SharePoint Online is “just” a collaboration tool.
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SharePoint when it is set up properly , and this is the crucial bit, can absolutely be the backbone of unified document management. Out of the box, yes, it’s basically a digital filing cabinet. But with the right configuration, the right add-ons to manage rights and workflows, the right thinking about information architecture? It becomes something else entirely.
Your people already know how to use it. The learning curve isn’t Mount Everest it’s more like a gentle hill in the Cotswolds.
I’ve have been through this transformation with enough organisations now to know what works and what absolutely does not. Success usually comes down to getting three things right:
Consolidate, don’t replace. Don’t not try to force every single document into a new system overnight. Start with the stuff that needs to work together, contracts that relate to active projects, compliance documents that inform decisions, reference materials that multiple teams need to access. Build from there.
Your finance team doesn’t wake up thinking about SharePoint libraries, they think about budget cycles and approval processes. Your solution has to match their mental model, not force them to adapt to some abstract information architecture.
When people can find documents faster, when they can collaborate without sending eighteen versions of the same file around by email, when they spend less time on administrative faff and more time on actual work… that is when they become your advocates.
We are at this weird inflection point where most organisations have been living with M365 long enough to understand both what it can do and where it falls short. Teams have developed their workarounds, some clever, some horrifying – but they are also getting increasingly frustrated with the fragmentation.
More importantly, senior leadership teams are recognising that information management is not just an IT problem. It is a business strategy question. The organisations that get this right in 2026 will have a significant advantage over those that keep muddling through with their patchwork of disconnected systems.
Get in touchThis is not about creating the perfect system – perfect doesn’t exist. This is about creating the right system for how your organisation actually works, with all its quirks and politics and established ways of doing things.
The goal isn’t to manage documents. The goal is to make better decisions, faster. To ensure that when your team needs information, they can find it without a twenty-minute treasure hunt.
Your M365 investment has already solved the foundation. Now it’s about building the structure that turns that foundation into competitive advantage.
The question is not whether your organisation needs unified document management – you do. The question is whether you’ll lead this change in 2026 or spend another year watching productivity leak through the cracks of fragmented systems.
Because frankly, your competitors are having these same conversations. Some of them are going to act on it.
If you’re thinking about how this might work for your organisation, we are running some small, honest conversations about practical approaches to consolidating information management.
No sales pitches, just peer-level discussion about what actually works .
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