What Is Document Management And Why Is It Important?
One of the greatest innovations in the field of knowledge management is the practice of document management. The benefits? Simply put, having everything in one place at one time and being able to access it and manage it. What could be better?
Let's take a look at what the term document management means to get the idea of the scope of its capabilities. Document management means handling documents so information can be created, shared, organized and stored efficiently and correctly.
It's a general rule of thumb for most organizations that the focus of document management is on the organization itself and the storage of documents it generates during the course of its operations. Of course having said that, they want to be able to still easily find the documents once they have been stored. Sounds like a tall order right? It would be if it weren't for the development of document management software.
Document management software may use a document imaging system. Or, it might not. It just depends on what the business needs to suit its organizational requirements. There's one other fly in the ointment with document management software - while it makes handling your electronic files easier, it doesn't help you convert paper files into electronic files. You basically, if you want the total document management system with all the bells and whistles, will likely need document imaging system capabilities. As you can probably guess, document management (especially combined with document imaging) would go a long way towards making an office paperless. However, the trick is to get it there by using the right equipment to achieve that end. Even today many offices are operating in a mixed environment, which would mean their document management system would have to be able to handle the paper as well.
As you can imagine, this is rather a Catch 22 situation for some organizations as they want to be able to manage their documents effectively, but unless they have document imaging, they can only handle the e-filing of e-created documents. So really then, just exactly what would be needed to have a comprehensive document management system? The first thing would be to organize and share all e-documents. You would of course want to associate other information with your documents, so you would want to be able to apply custom metadata to your documents. Metadata information is an attribute. That means, sets of attributes can be grouped into categories and associated with any document. You will also want to be able to classify your e-documents according to taxonomic hierarchies - meaning classifying organisms in an ordered system that indicates natural relationships. Along with this capability, you need to be able to rate and critique documents, automate change to document requests, document reviews and document approvals. And here is a really powerful feature of a document management system - the ability to work directly from programs like Lotus Mail, MSWord, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, to open and save documents directly from a repository. And, in addition, email documents to and from the repository. Don't worry about permissions to access the document. You have up to nine levels of permissions to work with. This is combined with the ability to do a comprehensive audit on all your documents as well, so you can see anything that has been done with them and by whom. Which brings up the search functions - you can find documents with a simple or advanced search function. And, there are many more functions document management software can provide your organization with. You just want to make sure the partnership is a good fit.
Knowledge Management
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