Documents. Like death and taxes, there is no avoiding them.

They are the lifeblood of business, pumping ceaselessly through the veins and arteries of all organisations in both paper and electronic form.

“Unless yours is a tiny one-person operation, you need documents to know what is going on in your business - like how much you sold during last month, what your expenses were and whether you made a profit,” document management system (DMS) resource website DMSGuide.com.

Good document management, DMSGuide tells us, should prevent unauthorised access to your confidential documents, and leakage of confidential data out of your business.

“There are other benefits, like easier access to needed documents and convenient yet more effective working practices that good document management produces.”

It sounds good. So how do you get started on the journey to better document management in your business and what issues do you need to consider? Here some suggestions.

The generation gap
A good place to start is with the understanding that different workers respond to different document management and collaboration processes.

Jonathan Stern, Australia/New Zealand Lotus regional executive at IBM Software, says there are three distinct types of approaches to collaboration and which one a worker embraces tends to relate to how long they have been in the workforce.

The baby-boomer generation tends to take a very “document-centric” approach to work. They are used to building a document and modifying it by sending it around to members of a group for review via email.

A second “people-centric” approach to collaboration – typically embraced by Generation X workers – revolves around mobile communication tools and instant messaging to enable quicker collaboration.

The newest arrivals on the work scene, Generation Y, rely more on social networking tools when working collaboratively. This demographic work best when they have “Facebook for the enterprise” tools at their disposal.

“When these people [Generation Y] come into the workforce they expect to see those tools in the workplace,” says Stern.

“We now see graduates making employment decisions based on some of the tools they use in the workforce.”

For companies like IBM, this trend has led to a focus on developing a suite of document management and collaboration tools aimed at meeting the needs of all three worker types.

Old habits
Convincing staff – particularly those in the “document-centric” demographic mentioned above – of the advantages of moving into a content management system (CMS) environment can be a challenge.

“Often, people who use MS Word to create their documents are comfortable using it and don’t care enough to try anything else – even if another program is more suitable for managing content,” says Paul Trotter, founder and CEO of Author-it Software.

“Problems occur with people who are accustomed to working on a document by themselves. When the transition is made to a CMS, it’s a team sport. Many times, the writers in an organisation, who may collectively be viewed as a team, actually share nothing more than a location. They may consult with each other about writing guidelines, but when it comes to the actual writing, Writer A works on Manual A and someone else on Manual B.

When moving into a CMS, especially the component-based variety, you immediately have components you need to share, so a person’s manual isn’t really ‘theirs’ – the effort of all the individuals contributes to it,” Trotter says.

“This can create a barrier because an individual may feel threatened, or others think they’re superior writers and don’t want other people’s substandard work gumming up their labour! What some writers fail to realise is that this process can help them focus on a specific niche in which they have particular expertise.

We’ve found people who might be writing entire manuals but they have a particular aptitude for writing procedures. A good CMS will allow them to concentrate on their specialty.”

Keep it simple
Ease of use is key to an effective DMS, says Document ONE director Kathy Speirs.

“If people find [a DMS solution] too complex they will just find ways not to use it, and will basically circumvent the entire purpose of what you were trying to achieve in the first place,” Speirs says.

“There are all sorts of solutions out there but unless you find one that your people will actually use then you’re wasting your time.” As well as having an easy-to-use solution, a DMS needs to have an effective classification for organising where items get filed.

“That’s got to be simple too. It’s got to mean something to the people who use it,” she says. One classic mistake organisations make when deploying a DMS is that they spend a lot of time initially designing a classification system but then forget about it.

“They never make any changes to it and over a couple of years it gets out of date and that really frustrates users because as soon as you go to find something, and it’s not where you expect it to be, that’s when you start thinking the system is no good, but it’s often not the system, it’s the way that information inside it has been structured.”

Keep it secure
A DMS should provide security that is higher than that of your network and should be a tamper-proof repository to store your documents, says software vendor Captaris in a white paper on automating document management. (Captaris’s Alchemy DMS solution is distributed locally by Canon New Zealand.)

Captaris says a DMS product should provide multiple security levels such as authentication, authorisation, audit trail, reporting and disaster recovery. In addition, role- and user-based security should be extendable to individual repositories as well as at a specific document level, regardless of location.

DMSGuide says possible sources of unauthorised document access can include:

• Competitors seeking competitive information about your business;
• Disgruntled employees seeking to damage your business in some way;
• Thieves seeking bank account or credit card identity details;
• Hackers seeking to show off their password and other security cracking skills;
• Viruses.

Because of the multitude of threats to document security, DMSGuide says, organisations need to plan and implement strong access procedures backed by appropriate storage facilities.

“The policies must specify who can access what documents and data, and what they can do with it. Authentication and other procedures must keep a track of movement of all sensitive documents.”

By Simon Hendery

Email? What email?

One issue intertwined with document management is archiving.

As Software vendor Captaris reminds us in a white paper on the subject, email has now supplanted paper- based and verbal communications as the most critical single element of the corporate communications infrastructure.

This begs the question of what to do with all those emails once they’ve been sent and received. Whether or not to archive email – and if so how much of it, and for how long – is an issue that generates ongoing debate amongst IT managers.

Some managers believe all content should be archived so that corporate knowledge held in email is retained. Others believe email should be deleted regularly in order to reduce the liability that may arise in the event of legal action or an official inquiry.

Captaris says there are essentially three basic views held by IT managers on the issue of archiving email:

1. Delete all email regularly
One group believes that all email should be deleted on a regular schedule – typically kept no longer than 90 days – so that potentially incriminating evidence will not be available during the discovery phase of a legal action or during a government inquiry.

Those in this camp find justification for their position in cases in which archived emails have harmed the organisations that kept them, such as the several internal emails written by Microsoft’s Bill Gates that were presented as evidence against Microsoft in the US government’s legal action against the company.

On the other hand, however, courts can instruct juries that if a party to a legal action destroys documents there is a presumption that the documents were damaging to the destroying party.

2. Keep all email for long periods
Another group believes that all emails should be kept for long periods, that they should be made accessible via archiving and tracking tools that permit an audit trail to be maintained, and that access to archived content should be permitted to employees and others for long periods of time.

This view is held by those who are a) averse to risk and believe that it is better to know about damaging evidence so that its harm can be minimized through the application of appropriate legal or other strategies; and b) those who desire to extract corporate knowledge from the information stored in messaging systems.

3. Keep only important email
A third group believes that emails should be categorized with regard to their importance and that some of this information should be kept long term, while unimportant information should be deleted regularly. Here, too, this view is held by those are averse to risk for legal or other reasons, as well as those who want to extract corporate knowledge from the messaging system.

Recommendation
Of course one of the characteristics of an email is that it is shared between a sender and a receiver. That fact is no doubt one of the key reasons Captaris’s recommendation is that archiving emails is the smartest course of action for any organisation, even if archived emails could be damaging to the company’s defence during a legal action.

As Captaris points out: “An organisation is better served by understanding the extent of its liability and opting to settle out-of-court rather than have another source produce archived emails that are damaging to the organisation.”