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Problems Around Document Management Faced by Enterprises

by Guy Vigneault — last modified 2008-05-01 21:37

While document management technologies and solutions have been around since the late 1980s, many companies haven’t solved the issues around document and knowledge creation, organization, collaboration and access. Working with many clients in this field, Optaros has often observed the following four scenarios:


Problems Around Document Management

SCENARIO A
 These companies do not have a document management solution in place and typically store their documents on file shares and the employees’ hard disk. This strategy quickly breaks down as the number of documents grows, the organizational structure increases in complexity, and/or egulatory factors come into play.

SCENARIO B
 Having implemented one document management System in a comprehensive and well integrated way, these companies have done everything what was needed. Very few companies are here, however.

SCENARIO C
 With the existence of two or maybe three document management solutions these companies have responded to urgent needs from business processes and collaboration need. Still much of the content is unmanaged either because these systems have not been rolled out to most users or because users have rejected the solution. Due to lack of integration and features, efficiency in usage is not optimal. Typically enterprise-wide searching is not possible. New ad hoc systems implemented for good reasons, such as Wikis or Intranets, make things worse.

SCENARIO D
 Most large companies are operating a whole portfolio of document management applications. Often these applications have been implemented based on an urgent business need in a specific department. Sometimes additional applications were added due to a merger or acquisition. As a result, documents are stored multiple times, cannot be searched seamlessly and there is no control of what is used and distributed.


Scenarios A, C or D are often the starting point for the implementation of a new document management system to consolidate what’s there or to provide the basis for better document management tomorrow.