Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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.