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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?"
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.
I'm not a cool guy, I just play one on T.V.
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 $2.7 billion/year industry (especially in finance and healthcare.)
On the other hand, as far as I can tell, the goals of "knowledge management" systems are undefined. I would be suspicious of someone selling a knowledge management system that can't provide a specific description of what the software does and how it's better than a traditional document management system.
I currently work as the CIO of a fairly progressive local government. I personally have always been a fan of "knowledge management" (dating back to my Big Six days when you HAVE to share knowledge from engagement to engagement) but was quite skeptical of "document management." I was wrong.
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Our municipality has gone from "we'll get back to you" to "let me look that up in front of you and give you a print out." It saves days. It creates new levels of customer service that were unheard of before the system. It's like before and after the web ("Was there ever a time we didn't have web daddy?" "Yes, that was when I used Compu$erve
Also, ask any law firm or insurance firm if they could handle their workflow needs without a DMS
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.
+++OK ATH