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Technology

Usefulness of Document Management? 30

Posted by Cliff from the provoking-some-kind-of-discourse dept.
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?"
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Usefulness of Document Management? More

Usefulness of Document Management?

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  • and no one ever mentions it or gives it a second thought. I'd like to see more articles/links on the topic too.
  • But google is all I need. If I cant find it there, it isnt worth finding. Google seems to feel that way too, hence their Google Answers service.

  • "Buzzword Compliance" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dr.Dubious DDQ ( 11968 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @04:40PM (#9280634) Homepage

    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.

    • What companies need to do is to analyze the return on investment that they'll get from such a system. In other words, how much time are they spending filing documents? How much time are they spending discarding obsolete documents? How often are documents taken from physical storage, and how long does this usually take? How often are documents lost or misfiled? Are backups of vital paper records being made?
  • 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 [kmmagazine.com], 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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by costas ( 38724 ) on Friday May 28, 2004 @05:12PM (#9280920) Homepage
      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)
      • I know, I'm picking on the KM people a bit. But you know, it's a little embarassing when a KM group in a company can spend millions of dollars on KM solutions for their websites, when all they really needed to do was do a google site specific search like "Keyword site:megacorp.com" and get better results.

      • In reality the typical implementation of corporate knowledge management is some crappy lotus notes application.
      • > want to debug an OSS app and the docs (if there
        > 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
    • Heh, I just noticed that instead of a procedures documentation standard, I wrote down a CD-ROM file format instead.

      It's ISO 9000, not ISO 9660.
    • The ISO 9660 drone where I last worked was a mouth breathing zombie. She would ask us to "put the intranet on a CD" about every three months. I love the way the parent post so eloquently nails the topic!
    • 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 ta
    • 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 wher

    • Re:It's called Knowlege Management (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Do you mean iso9000?

      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

  • 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 pape
  • Employees at companies write things down. It's important that companies organize what employees write down so that other people can access those things, and so managers can control who can change what document and look at document history. Does this sound important to you? That's document control and information management.

    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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Document Management can = Increased Liability (Score:3, Informative)

    by NateTech ( 50881 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @02:38AM (#9283743)
    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.
  • Thank you everybody for your responses. To reply to them as a whole, I see many good points being made - however.

    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

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