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

"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.

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)