Usefulness of Document Management?

Ace905 asks: "Document and Information Management are huge money-making courses for Colleges and Universities. A lot of web sites are dedicated to the concept of 'Records Management' - but they seem to receive relatively little traffic. Wordtracker's results for the term 'records Management' seem to show people search mostly for public records - looking to find information on themselves and celebrities. Two of the only Usenet newsgroups to discuss records management (comp.doc.management and misc.business.records-mgmt) are either incredibly under-read or filled almost entirely by spammers. How can this industry have so many resources dedicated to it, and yet be virtually ignored by almost every professional out there? What are your experiences in the field of records and information management? What are your views on this industry?"

Comments

Money!!!

[vijaya_chandra]

Document and Information Management are huge money-making courses for Colleges and Universities.

it's not just the courses that are money-making.

proof?!
everyone from google to microsoft is after the monies involved

We have doc management here at work

[whodkne]

and no one ever mentions it or gives it a second thought. I'd like to see more articles/links on the topic too.

"Information Management"?

[aramith]

from the article: (a) equip students with the fundamental knowledge, skills and capabilities to function effectively as information managers; Translation: we teach you to be librarians. Didn't know you had to have a graduate degree to look up books.

Re:"Information Management"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, troll, librarians almost always have an MLS - Master of Library Science.

I dont know about you

[TheRealMindChild]

But google is all I need. If I cant find it there, it isnt worth finding. Google seems to feel that way too, hence their Google Answers service.

"Buzzword Compliance"

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

There is a lot of talk lately where I'm employed about the "need" for "Electronic Document Management"(tm), but nobody seems to know EXACTLY what we need or want from it, and nobody's really put any though thus far into working on some user requirements specs for it so that we can evaluate what we really DO need.

Thus far, proprietary EDM sites seem to be filled to the brim with low-content fluff but little REAL information about exactly what you get from them. Even presuming they DO have truly worth-the-price features, it seems difficult to really pin down what those features really ARE...

I think that's part of the reason they can get away with such egregiously high license fees.

Re:"Buzzword Compliance"

[Jmstuckman]

What companies need to do is to analyze the return on investment that they'll get from such a system. In other words, how much time are they spending filing documents? How much time are they spending discarding obsolete documents? How often are documents taken from physical storage, and how long does this usually take? How often are documents lost or misfiled? Are backups of vital paper records being made?

Re:"Buzzword Compliance"

[Anonymous Coward]

Document management isn't only about storage but has a lot to do with versioning, workflow, approvals etc etc, and *mainly* control. Uncontrolled documents can be a nightmare. Any beurocracy can't live with out it. The reason those prices are so high is because the industries that need it are the big-uns, and they can't live without it.

It's called Knowlege Management

[Profane MuthaFucka]

And it's equally worthless. There will always be those people who went to college, attended all their classes, studied hard, but somehow forgot to pick up a skill.

That's why there's a field called Knowlege Management. We can't kill those people, and they have to eat. Welfare just has a bad image.

Knowlege management (KM) and its cousins called ISO 9660 or CMM are designed to give people who don't know anything or know how to do anything something to do. Their job is to keep track of everthing that the people who know something know, and what the people who can do something can do.

If you doubt me, check out the website of KM Magazine, the original KM industry publication. Look at the blurb from the current issue:

Change management features heavily in the implementation of any knowledge-management strategy and is one of the trickiest elements to get right. This month, however, we turn the tables a little and look at how, once established, the lessons learnt from implementing knowledge management and its related practices, tools and mindsets can ease the pain of further business-transformation initiatives, such as adopting new technology, re-focusing corporate strategies, or managing mergers or acquisitions.

What a pile of horseshit! WTF is that supposed to mean? And if it really means something, I bet it costs companies a lot of money. As further evidence, take a look at the rest of their website. What a bunch of boring shit. We all should be happy that KM is a field that is mostly ignored, because I can't imagine what hell my life would be if I had to do KM as part of my job.

Here's their tips:

NEWS: Nine tips for KM executives

TAKEN FROM APQC's latest book by Carla O'Dell, The Executive's Role in Knowledge Management, KM professionals can learn from the following pieces of advice:

1. Get smart. Understand knowledge-sharing behaviours and support systems. Read, benchmark and get feedback;
2. Start planning. Assess where you stand on the KM learning curve and identify the business-strategy components in need of support. Before embarking on any change efforts you need to know where you are and where you want to go;
3. Set guiding principles and define your needs. Your involvement in this step will mitigate resistance and change-management issues. Executive involvement and periodic meetings ensure you know any risks or issues that come up so you can react accordingly. Adopting the right knowledge-management approach depends on its context and objectives;
4. Find the processes and projects that support your value proposition, inform the rest of the organisation and demand a solid business case;
5. Select pilot projects that give your organisation a good chance of early success and a testing ground for new techniques and methods;
6. Follow tried-and-true principles of design, such as employing a multi-disciplinary KM core group and sound change principles. Get buy-in and understanding from the organisation;
7. Guide the implementation and launch of your projects. Ensure employees are properly trained, and that results and lessons are documented accurately;
8. Apply learning from the pilot projects in an expansion strategy that embeds KM into every area of the organisation;
9. Sustain your improvements and plan to scale up.

Note how all of these activities for KM success involve a bunch of fuzzy activities. The closest any of them get to actually doing something is number 7, and that's just advice to watch closely while someone else does the work.

Re:It's called Knowlege Management

[costas]

Behind all the buzzwords, there is real value in knowledge management, if it's done right. As an example: what do you do if you want to debug an OSS app and the docs (if there are any) aren't much help? you go to Google Groups, right? well, that is a KM application right there: the "knowledge" for an OSS application is usually the help given by experienced users to others in mailing lists or newsgroups, and if you're lucky that help gets archived by something as nice and helpful as GG.

Well, for internal enterprise apps, or any other enterprise effort that requires specialized knowledge, it would be nice if you could fire up GG and try to find an answer that only some super-user knows. That's knowledge management and it's tremendously useful.

In practical terms though, KM is not needed by very small shops (as the KM is done by the experts themselves directly) and very large shops enforce KM sort of indirectly by requiring audit trails, documentation, etc. There exists though an unhappy medium of companies where experts are too spread out or unknown and where the processes aren't in place to enforce documentation that could really use KM. So, don't knock it.

(not a KM expert, just have an interest)

Re:It's called Knowlege Management

[Profane MuthaFucka]

I know, I'm picking on the KM people a bit. But you know, it's a little embarassing when a KM group in a company can spend millions of dollars on KM solutions for their websites, when all they really needed to do was do a google site specific search like "Keyword site:megacorp.com" and get better results.

Re:It's called Knowlege Management

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Heh, I just noticed that instead of a procedures documentation standard, I wrote down a CD-ROM file format instead.

It's ISO 9000, not ISO 9660.

Re:It's called Knowlege Management

[two_socks]

The ISO 9660 drone where I last worked was a mouth breathing zombie. She would ask us to "put the intranet on a CD" about every three months. I love the way the parent post so eloquently nails the topic!

Re:It's called Knowlege Management

[torinth]

You're obviously an unabashed engineer (or engineer-type), although that's not a surprise given the forum. You like to work alone, or in small groups of people you respect. When faced with the a large company, and the unavoidable fact that 80% of employees in every department (including engineering) are poor workers who spend most of their time mastering the art of looking like they're working, you grow uncomfortable. So you stay in your cubicle or small department, or you start a freelance business where you don't have to deal with these problems at all.

Unfortunately, the economy benefits from big business and therefore requires people who are able to tolerate and manage that useless 80%. These people are professional executives and managers. They get business, communications, or resource management degrees and some even go so far as to get MBA's. In so doing, they learn a whole new kind of jargon and a whole set of skills which make absolutely no sense to you. Your keenness for knowledgable people and your own personal skill encourages you to forget about stupid people in leave them in your wake. Were you to actually try to deal with them, instead, (not that you should,) you'd develop all kinds of ideas about how to do that.

Unfortunately, organizing and motivating the lazy and stupid workforce is one of the hardest problems out there, akin to uniting General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. All this non-sense you quoted from KM magazine is an attempt at that. Is it analytic, like you'd like? No, but neither is the subject (a shitty workforce). Does it work and with adequate interpretation? Sometimes, and probably only temporarily.

But it's not a pile of horshit, it's the sincere work of people working on the one of the hardest problem in modern society.

Re:It's called Knowlege Management

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. I'm speechless. I didn't know you PHBs were so well-spoken.

Re:It's called Knowlege Management

[torinth]

I'm not a PHB, I just play one when I think somebody loses sight of the whole picture.

Re:It's called Knowlege Management

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Well that's a perfectly cromulent response. Thanks!

Re:It's called Knowlege Management

[eraserewind]

In reality the typical implementation of corporate knowledge management is some crappy lotus notes application.

Re:It's called Knowlege Management

[Chemisor]

> want to debug an OSS app and the docs (if there
> are any) aren't much help? you go to Google Groups, right?

Wrong. You email the package maintainer. Most people never debug an app that doesn't work; they just drop it and go look for another one that does. Or they write something themseleves. Or they find a workaround that doesn't require any such software at all. But if you do want the package fixed, take my advice and email the maintainer. The maintainers are lonely people, who rarely get any feedback on the project. They'll be very happy to talk to you. Don't assume that all OSS projects are busy like mozilla or gcc; most would cherish and need your bug reports. Most of those projects are not talked about in Google groups. Most people have never even heard of Google groups.

Re:It's called Knowlege Management

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean iso9000?

Now I partially agree with your rant, I look at KM like project managment and the PMI. It's about making money for a lot of the people who latch on.

On the other hand, if you're doing real business or important work (real business being like having more than a few hundred or thousand customers) you're going to have issues managing documents and knowledge. Now you as a geek or developer may not give a shit but when you get a little older and you're sick of the same problems over and over and you want to share the wealth of work, you'll appriciate it.

Simple question, how many meetings do you attend? If you're fairly senior, I'd guess at least 2 a week; that seems light to me at least a status and a team meeting if you are actually doing work and coordinating with anybody then you're looking at more. How many of those produce something? Is it recorded? There should be a document or a set of them from every one of those meetings or maybe the meeting doesn't need to happen. I've seen this shit hundreds of times, policy will be dictated and decided in a small meeting and never move any where; then when someone actually produces a document it's never shared. There is another problem, my current VP, Mitchell, is an idiot at the non-political aspects of business he'll record everything wrong because he clearly doesn't understand the issues and this is a small company ( It's just like the web, take google, altavista and company out of it and you'd be hard pressed to use it.

DM and KM are easily misunderstood

[TechnoBoffin]

Document Management and Knowledge Management are two (sometimes very) different things. Document Management is pretty much required for businesses of all sizes. I'm not sure if it's a state or national law, but I know that in Texas, companies are required by law to be able to produce pretty much any document sent to, sent from, or used by the company for 7 years. This includes all financial documents, checks, tax returns, letters from customers, etc. At the most basic level, it's handled by dumping papers into document boxes, putting a date on the side, and stacking the boxes up in a spare room. As a company gets bigger, that isn't feasable anymore. Companies used to get documents "imaged" to microfilm or microfiche, nowadays they're scanned into an electronic format, usually a TIFF or something similar. I work for a fairly large insurance company. We have a complete document management solution that involves scanning every bit of paper into TIFFs, then putting those into a workflow application so we can move applications, policies, and claims around electronically without needing a stack of files on everyone's desk.

Knowledge management is a whole different ballgame. It's frequently tied to document management, but with a whole lot more bells and whistles. Do you have a corporate intranet where you work? A company newsletter? A file server where shared documents are stored? Those are attempts at knowledge management. KM products that you buy or build tie those various resources together to give employees a one-stop shop to find information. The more robust solutions seem to be intranet-based lately, where you have a company "portal" where you can search for documents enterprise-wide, get current corporate news, manage your HR benefits, etc. A lot of the offerings in that space aren't necessarily tied to the "KM Movement", and a lot more are home-grown, so you won't find them in Google results.

Document Control

[Voivod]

Employees at companies write things down. It's important that companies organize what employees write down so that other people can access those things, and so managers can control who can change what document and look at document history. Does this sound important to you? That's document control and information management.

Pretend you are Intel. What do you do with the schematic for the CPU you spent $1B designing? The procedure document for how to test it? The list of components? The source code of the firmware and test software? Documentation of its features? Would this software be worth a lot of money to you? Yeah. Pretend you work for the IT department at the CIA. Or you manage MSDN for Microsoft. I mean, all these things are obvious, and they're all million dollar if not billion dollar problems. Did you really have to write Slashdot to figure this out?

P.S. Pointing to a hit counter on a random home page at Homestead is a pretty stupid way to demonstrate that a concept gets "relatively little" traffic. A Google search for "document control" alone gets 9,360,000 hits.

Re:Document Control

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, blatant lie stated as truth? You must be a troll.

Your stated search: "document control"

returns about 209,000 hits, at time of writing.

Oh, hang on, maybe you're being ingenuous, which is further borne out by your search for "document control" instead of "knowledge management".

Naah, it's probably that you just don't know how the tools you're given and you think inventing a "new" technology is a good solution for your inadequacies

There is another name for it

[grag]

It's called Information Science. As far as I know, it is only offered as a graduate program, either as a Master or PhD. In my search for a graduate program in Information Science, I have noticed more schools of Information Science offering degrees that tie in your typical information science idealogy and integrating technology.

As another poster suggested, these people are also known as libarians. They catalog, classify, store, retrieve, and research information. Anything else needing to be added to the list of librarian tasks?

Document management and knowledge management

[Jmstuckman]

Document and knowledge management aren't necessarily the same thing. The basic function of a document management system is to fulfill the tasks that microfilm was traditionally used for - retaining large amounts of visual documents that need to stay around but aren't efficient to store as paper. Companies are often required to retain documents like these for legal purposes or for business purposes. One major use of a "document management" system would for digitizing and storing medical records that would take up many rooms of space in a traditional filing cabinet system.

In the legal realm, digitized documents being stored in a document management system are usually admissible as evidence in court as long as the procedure used to store the documents is sufficiently controlled and as long as sufficient controls are put into place to prevent unauthorized users from modifying the documents. In cases where retention requirements exist for records, a good document management system can greatly reduce the costs associated with meeting these requirements.

If I was considering the usefulness of a document management system, I would ask a few questions. How are archival methods such as microfilm currently being used in the company? How much space is devoted to filing cabinets and document storage areas? How much labor is expended in retreiving documents from the file room each day? Such questions will help determine the cost-effectiveness of installing such a system.

Geeks may shun "document management" systems, but never the less, these systems are quickly taking the place of microfilm/microfiche in business and are growing into a $2.7 billion/year industry (especially in finance and healthcare.)

On the other hand, as far as I can tell, the goals of "knowledge management" systems are undefined. I would be suspicious of someone selling a knowledge management system that can't provide a specific description of what the software does and how it's better than a traditional document management system.

Go ask your local government what they do ...

[caboosesw]

I currently work as the CIO of a fairly progressive local government. I personally have always been a fan of "knowledge management" (dating back to my Big Six days when you HAVE to share knowledge from engagement to engagement) but was quite skeptical of "document management." I was wrong.

Our municipality has gone from "we'll get back to you" to "let me look that up in front of you and give you a print out." It saves days. It creates new levels of customer service that were unheard of before the system. It's like before and after the web ("Was there ever a time we didn't have web daddy?" "Yes, that was when I used Compu$erve ...")

Also, ask any law firm or insurance firm if they could handle their workflow needs without a DMS ...

It's called Knowlege Management-Word wars.

[Anonymous Coward]

"cromulent"

Darn you! You broke my dictionary.

Document Management can = Increased Liability

[NateTech]

One downside to heavy policy forcing the use of document management and the tools to do it is that the entire document database can be supoenaed in a heartbeat in a liability case.

Humans learn by making mistakes. Having no evidence trail of those mistakes can sometimes be useful. We all know that from the time we're little kids. "Oooh, you scraped your knee! Mom's gonna know you fell down!"

This is probably why document shredders are more widely applied than document management.

Knowledge Management / Document Management

[Ace905]

Thank you everybody for your responses. To reply to them as a whole, I see many good points being made - however.

Most of the posts here talk about document management and software (Not surprising, this is slashdot). The industry itself is a lot more than that, I know because I work in it. Also there are many college courses dedicated to filing practices, filing methods, maintaining proper storage equipment.

As much as the slashdot community by it's very nature is against physical records management - we have more paper records than ever before. It is an industry that looks like it will be growing with current technology.

Document scanning and imaging costs a lot more money than most people think. In fact most companies have had at least one shot at trying to image documents and given up entirely. The reason is - records management is not a commonly understood profession. Many employees at smaller companies take filing and records management for granted. ARMA, the authority on records and information management has forgone a useful web site for more marketing materials and event listings (ie. marketing).

What I was really looking for here, on top of a discussion, was people's opinions of the industry and some direction for the company I work at, in terms of marketing and service offerings. We are already very well established for mobile storage equipment, filing services and the odd consulting job. In the past we sold software and got out of the industry because the market was more trouble than it was worth. Now that i'm on board, I'm re-examining that and trying to come up with a solution that appeals to our customers, or a new type of customer, and meets an industry demand.

I think you've helped me with that in this forum, thank you very much.

--Doug Styles
Infofile Systems Inc.

Re:Knowledge Management / Document Management

[Anonymous Coward]

aiim.org handles most of this stuff including yearly
big conventions, etc.
hope this helps!