Document Management - a view on Slothower.com

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Note: This piece appeared in the May/June 1999 issue of Enterprise Solutions: For Lotus Notes & Domino which is a useful controlled circulation (free) magazine for Notes/Domino developers.

A Well Founded Fear

I have been working with document control and distribution systems for almost 20 years and in that time I have seen systems bring order out of chaos and I have seen disorder spring up overnight with ill-conceived implementations. I am excited by the possibilities of what Document Management Systems can do for organizations, but I also have a well-founded fear of what document management could do to them.

Planning is everything for document management, and the single most important planning question is "why?" Without a good answer the users will sabotage the system because they do not see any benefit to the extra work required of them.

The second question is just as tough - "just because we can manage every document, should we?" The answer should often be "no".

The landscape is littered with document management systems that were implemented ignoring one or more of the following guidelines:

Clearly identify the problem. If you do not have common agreement about the problem being solved you are wasting time and money.

Involve the end users. In approaching document management remember that users are already managing documents. Maybe not well, and maybe not effectively, but all documents are managed. We are not introducing to people something totally new - we are going to ask them to do things differently - and change management is an important element in an effective implementation of a document management system. Nothing can sabotage a system as quickly and effectively as a group of secretaries that were perfectly content with the way things were and view the 'new' system as someone's plot to make their lives more difficult.

Begin with a pilot project. To develop user support, as well as gain system experience, identify documents and workflow processes that currently cause the greatest frustration, then change will bring readily apparent benefits.

Equally important, identify documents that have no business being managed and stay away from them. If there is not a clear reason to put a particular document under management, don't. You can always add it later, but adding a document without a clear benefit will cause the entire system to become suspect in the eyes of the users.

Make a distinction between the people who create and revise documents and those that only use the information. You will often find that the needs of these two groups are very different. It is often important to separate document creation from distribution.

Plan for change. Build a system and a process that can be quickly adapted to changing circumstances, that can integrate with a wide variety of sources and outputs, and places control in the hands of the people that use it every day.

I have few personal horror stories because the first installations I managed were departmental level - and I was the department manager. The specifications and development were directed from the user viewpoint because I knew I was going to have to live with the results. This proved fortuitous as I came to learn that the single biggest reason for EDMS failure is the lack of user involvement from the very beginning.

John Slothower, Principal Consultant with Systems Consulting Group in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has been working with document control and distribution systems since 1981. Current projects include designing editorial workflow systems for Web publishing and trying to convince clients that document management is not,, automatically, knowledge management. He can be reached at jslothow@scg-corp.com. [no longer valid]

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