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)

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.

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 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 ...

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.