The best way to manage large collections of documents is with a Document Management System. This article describes basic concepts of document management, tries to convince you that you can't do business without it, and gives you an overview of the nitty-gritty that you must do to successfully implement document management for your group or company. There's a lot of material, so we've broken it into two parts. Basic concepts are here, in Part I. You'll find the nitty-gritty in Part II.

Why Do You Need Document Management?

This chapter is the heart of Intranet Document Management. You can put into place the most elegant, flashy Intranet possible, but if there's no meat, what's the purpose? Let's not lose sight of why we're doing all this in the first place. Sure, who doesn't like being the first on the block to know how to write HTML, create Java and CGI scripts, and it certainly doesn't hurt the résumé either. But let's get down to brass tacks; we're doing this to communicate information that is vital to the life of a company.

Maybe this isn't the heart of the book, but, more accurately, it's the blood. Everything else, the e-mail, workflow, online meetings, the browser, and so forth, are the arteries and veins. Put all that in place, and you still have to transport good, healthy red blood--useful, accurate, current information--where and when it's needed.

Document management is how we can ensure that the blood, information/content, of a company is healthy because it's managed properly. Document management tools can assure us that we're working with healthy information and that it moves to where it's needed.

Information Byway to Highway History

Feel free to skip to "What is a Document Management System (DMS)?" if you don't want the history. But be forewarned that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Way back when, scribes were needed to write down information. Before information was scribed onto papyrus, a decision had to be made whether or not it was worth it. The entire process of recording information was acutely limited. It was laborious to share ideas, and only the privileged had access to written documents. There was great value placed on the written word. Throughout the ages, people worked to preserve written works and kept close track of what existed. Libraries and systematic filing and classification systems developed.

Many have said that the Internet is the epitome of intellectual freedom, and a strenuous battes to protect it from being censored. This freedom has furthered the movement of open and easy access to information. It has also accelerated the pace of change and placed us at the opposite end of the scribe/papyrus spectrum (see Figure 9.1). It is both easy to commit information to paper and/or electronic form and to access the information. The problem now is where is it? Available by search: Sure, "Here are the first 10 of 17,340 documents that match your search."

We have been accused of being a "throw-away" society. But not exactly. We are also very reluctant to dispose of unneeded items. Has anyone run out of hard disk space lately? How many ministorage depositories did you pass on your way to work today? This carries over to how we create and retain our work.

In the business world it is almost too easy to dash off a memo (e-mail of course) to a colleague. Now the question is does that memo have future value, and how can you tell if it has future value? When confronted with the thousands of written works created by a medium-to-large business in the course of one day, too often we lose track of critical information with future value. Lost because you can't find it but it's still around "somewhere." Or permanently lost/deleted in the fury of cleaning a full e-mail box, or lost when the only person who knew where it was leaves the company. Does the future usefulness of someone's work have to depend on the successor? No one ever fills someone else's shoes exactly. I know I have specialized in certain areas that my predecessor ignored and work in my specialized area was lost. And what about my successor, my successor's successor, and on down the line? Consider by way of example the following three case histories.

Case History Number 1

One large consulting company admitted that they could locate only 20 percent of their electronic files for their company products. (We're not even talking about memos here.) This company produces millions of pages of information. Information is, in fact, one of their products. But they didn't treat it that way. Imagine having employees and management throw away 80 percent of their own product on a regular basis.

Case History Number 2

Another sorry sight was the large moving box filled with diskettes that someone pulled out and showed me. Somewhere, she explained, in a spreadsheet file on one of the disks was critical information from an expensive survey done about a year ago. The information was still useful, but there had been some turnover in the group, and now they couldn't find it. The numerous disks contained files with cryptic eight-character names. The only worse scenario would have been having the spreadsheet on paper only in invisibleThey would have to redo the work.

Case History Number 3

In another company much time and effort was put into developing best practices for software development. Hundreds of templates from project management to user acceptance testing were developed and made available through the Internal Web. Software development teams faithfully used these templates and followed all the best practices. What was missing though was a best practice for where to put all the workpapers for sharing and future reference. Each team lost the opportunity to reuse and build on other teams' work.

These situations are neither unique nor new. What is new is that with the advent of online documentation, this pattern can as easily be exacerbated as improved. Woe to the company that carries over its bad paper practices to online. What about freedom of speech and personal style? Does this mean I shouldn't create documents willy-nilly anymore? Not exactly, I'm asking that you better identify the valuable and useful information that you create. Take some credit for your good ideas that others can find and use. Document management isn't a new idea; this problem of creating and losing information wasn't as widespread when we had secretaries.

Secretaries preserved document management integrity. They were our helpers in creating, filing, and finding information. They set up systems for keeping track of information and conscientiously used them. Good secretaries also made judgments about what information had future usefulness. There were, and still are, classes in records management; it's a whole discipline for which degrees have been given and books have been written. When WYSIWYG word processors became available, everyone became a typist. Notice I said typist; I didn't say secretary.

In fact, far too often no one replaces a secretary. Secretaries have become almost as obsolete as manual typewriters. Big mistake! We jumped too quickly on a new technology, ignoring the big picture.

Some companies have figured out that as they downsize and eliminate secretaries they need Document Management Systems as well as word processing. But too often it is individual groups within a company that identify a need and solve it for themselves. The result is varying levels of document management and a heterogeneous environment where multiple systems cannot talk to each other. Neither can they search for documents company-wide. Individual groups doing their own thing within a company are simply putting their finger in the dike and holding at bay the onslaught of information.

It's hard to put something like this in place for a big company. (See the Practical Strategy section later in this chapter.) It means gathering information from each operational group, sharing this information between the groups, finding common ground or defining new common ground, and filtering the new practices all the way to the top. It's true reengineering. Just like having a secretary, for some it will seem limiting; for others it will be liberating.

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