Document Management - What it is and why?

It has been my experience that oftentimes, many companies do a better job managing and securing their office supplies than they do their business-critical documents.

The electronic documents that are essential and critical for today's business are all too often taken totally for granted. Very few businesses take the time to consider the expenses that they might incur because of:

* Time and effort wasted in locating documents. Recent research indicates that nearly 10% of an average office worker’s day is spent trying to locate existing information and documents.
* Redundant effort expended because it’s often easier to recreate something than it is to try to find it.
* Time and effort involved in figuring out who has the latest version of a document, and recovering it when various revisions overwrite each other.
* Unnecessary and inefficient usage of network storage devices and network bandwidth, because the documents are dispersed everywhere across the businesses' storage devices, rather than in a centralized, indexed, location.

Likewise, few businesses take the time to consider the considerable risks that they expose themselves to on a daily basis because:

* Security is applied haphazardly at best, which potentially exposes important information to inspection by inappropriate people, like your competitors.
* Critical documents are stored -- often exclusively -- on laptop computers that could be lost, stolen, or damaged at any time.
* Documents that are stored centrally on Windows network drives, once deleted, do not go into a recycle bin as commonly believed. They simply disappear, and must be restored from backup (if you’re smart enough to have one).
* No record exists of precisely who has viewed and/or edited a document. It’s therefore impossible to audit a business process to uncover mistakes or inefficiencies.

In rather stuffy terms, a Document Management System (DMS) can control the life cycle of documents in your organization — how they are created, reviewed, and published, and how they are ultimately disposed of or retained.

We at Mousley Consulting, Inc. believe that properly designed and used Document Management System can rapidly pay for itself. Furthermore, we do not believe that there is a one-size, fits (or suits) all software application. The range of solutions goes from inexpensive, open-source systems based on Unix-based servers to robust, hosted Microsoft SharePoint applications customized to seamlessly support proprietary workflows - what are your business requirements?

Dr. Kirk Mousley