Document Management Systems

In a broad sense Document Management Systems(DMS) provide the tools to organise electronic and paper based documents. Since the ideal paperless office is an impossible dream, document management systems must provide facilities to categorise paper resources also.

There are several products on the market today and range from indexing systems to complex enterprise systems that provide:

• Auditing;
• Check-in and check-out facilities;
• Version control;
• Compound/bound documents;
• Publish to the web;
• Achieves;
• Search facilities;
• Content management;
• Document scanning; and
• Employ workflow processes.

Generally a DMS will provide the following:

• An optical scanner with Optical Character Recognition (OCR);
• A database system to organise stored documents; and
• A search mechanism to quickly find specific documents.

Benefits for Business

Although document management systems are only part of a complete information technology solutions they do provide business a number of benefits stand alone:

• Finding the documents that you need when you need them;
• Prevents loss of data;
• Provide the tools that empower information workers to work together over distance; and
• Record all changes and and audit of who changed each document.

As always a prudent implementation strategy is best when dealing with information technology. Most complete DMS's are extensive solutions, and there may be issues when a Return on Investment is not forth coming.

In most cases however, empowering your information workers by providing tools they can use to get what they want fast is always a good strategy. For it is this kind of mind set that filters into customer service, and corporate culture.

How to get Started

If you already have an intranet the easiest prudent solution is to add document categorisation facilities. This means that links can be created by anyone who has access to the intranet to documents stored on the network already. Intranet users should be able to add document links under any number of categories and search facilities can be added when the number of documents warrants it.

You will need to survey staff to find out how useful they find the facilities, in order to establish if further development is warranted.

Investment at this level is inconsequential and your web developer will be able to build a system at this level fairly quickly.

From this point should the investment prove beneficial then its time to evaluate alternatives available.