Usefulness of Document Management? 30
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?"
We have doc management here at work (Score:1)
I dont know about you (Score:2)
"Buzzword Compliance" (Score:4, Interesting)
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" (Score:2)
It's called Knowlege Management (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [kmmagazine.com], the original KM industry publication. Look at the blurb from the current issue:
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:
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:2)
Re:It's called Knowlege Management (Score:2)
Re:It's called Knowlege Management (Score:2)
> 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 feedb
Re:It's called Knowlege Management (Score:1)
It's ISO 9000, not ISO 9660.
Re:It's called Knowlege Management (Score:1)
Document management and knowledge management (Score:3, Informative)
Re:It's called Knowlege Management (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's called Knowlege Management (Score:1)
Re:It's called Knowlege Management (Score:2)
Re:It's called Knowlege Management (Score:1, Insightful)
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
DM and KM are easily misunderstood (Score:2, Informative)
Document Control (Score:2)
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
There is another name for it (Score:1)
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 li
Go ask your local government what they do ... (Score:2, Informative)
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
Document Management can = Increased Liability (Score:3, Informative)
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 (Score:2)
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