Document Management System Functions

The goal of a Document Management System (DMS) should be to manage the documents authored with desktop applications like MS Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Visio, Project or similar tools.

We identify some enterprise issues that organizations will encounter as a DMS is rolled out. Integro recommends organizations invest in the development of a Knowledge Automation Strategy (KAS) that addresses the following areas.

Structure and Taxonomy
Like a library, a DMS is organized in two main ways, Physical and Logical. The physical organization of a library is the floor plan, sections, rows, shelves, and books. In the DMS we call this the structure, which is File Room, File Cabinet, Binder Category, Binder and Document. The logical organization of a Library is the Dewey Decimal System. In the DMS we call this the Taxonomy, or profile of a document.

At many organizations, much of the structure of the DMS implies the taxonomy; the location of the document has meaning. While this approach works for department implementations like, it has serious shortcomings for enterprise solutions. Before the DMS is deployed on an enterprise basis, an organization wide structure and taxonomy should be designed.

The structure of the DMS should be organized for Authors and focus on security, workflow, documents, and authoring groups. The cornerstones of the structure are File Cabinets and Document Types. File Cabinets should be created to house documents that have similar purpose: Business Process, Department Function, Corporate Matrix, or Individual Use. Document Types should be constructed to support the specific automation needs of documents such as review or approval processes.

Taxonomy is unique to the organization, and typically reflects the following attributes of a document:

• Description: Title, Document Type, Content Type
• Responsibility: Division, Department, Section, Owner
• Use: Process, Subject, Classification, Keywords
• Retention: Record Name, Record Series or File Plan

Author and Consumer Needs
A DMS is an author-centric application. Most organizations get into trouble when they design the DMS with document consumers as their primary user. As described above, the structure of the DMS should be organized for the Authoring process of creation, review, and approval. The taxonomy of the document is very helpful for the consumer. There are two main features of a DMS that should be implements to support consumer needs: Indexing and Publishing.

Document Indexing
Indexing of documents can be done in the DMS using the full text index of the databases. A complementary approach is to use an external index that contains only the taxonomy (profile) of a document.

Full text indexing in the DMS provides the user a way to search directly in the File Cabinets for all document information including the actual text authored in the document. Maintaining this type of index on a server requires significant overhead, especially as the number of documents grow. The impact is degraded performance for all server tasks because the indexer is always running. Second, the search time experienced by the end user can be painfully slow because the search needs to look in a very large index. This full-text indexing feature is available with the DMS and is turned on at most organizations.

Maintaining a separate index database can be very efficient and responsive if the consumer is searching based on the taxonomy. This index is similar to the card catalog at a library and can allow the user to find or search for the document based on any attribute. Add-in tools for automatically maintaining this index are readily available for integration with the DMS Solution.

Publishing
When the text of the document needs to be made available to consumers, it is often desirable to publish the content in Web or PDF format to a consumer oriented site. Publishing provides two significant advantages to an organization: Navigation and Format independence. Since many of the documents in the DMS are consumer oriented documents like Policy and Procedures, a publishing solution should be investigated soon. There are readily available solutions in the market that integrate with many DMS solutions ranging from basic format conversion tools to complete web content management systems.

With a publishing solution, the consumer does not need to navigate the DMS structure and does not need to have the authoring application to read it. Publishing allows content to be automatically rendered to the common formats of Web (XML, HTML, JPG, etc..) and PDF. Common formats allow the quick load of the content onto the workstation and also minimize the licensing requirements for specialized authoring tools like Visio and Project.

Scanning
There is a need to evaluate and integrate a scanning solution for a robust DMS implementation. Many organizations have several multi-function devices from Canon, Xerox or another major vender deployed throughout the organizations that have copy, print, scan, and fax capabilities. There are solutions on the market that integrate with DMS solutions and each have their relative advantages.

Enterprise Deployment

Organizational Readiness involves the assessment and planning for and adoption of new technologies in an organization. Implementing a DMS presents unique challenges, especially if a technology goal is to replace the use of LAN drives with the DMS. Consider incorporating organizational readiness as a component of enterprise deployment focusing on the following areas:

• Individuals: Individual stakeholders within the organization are unwilling or unable to support the new roles, processes and/or behaviors required by the technology change.
• Change: The ability and skills of the organization to successfully transition the people, processes, and technology from their present state to the desired state is inadequate to support the technology change.
• Culture: The intangible set of beliefs, behaviors, and assumptions that guide people’s day-to-day activities are not in alignment with those needed to support the technology change
• Leadership: The organization's intent to create change, facilitated through sponsorship, change agent effectiveness and the foundation for change.
• Business Process: The business processes currently in place are inadequate to support the optimization of business results using the new technology.
• Development: The solution development process for applications and/or infrastructure is inadequate to support the effort required by the technology change.
• Operations Process: The technology operations processes are inadequate to support the effort required to develop, deploy, operate and/or optimize the technology change.

Records Retention

Most records management policies state that documents must be clearly defined as official business records. It is possible, to state that all versions of documents are official business records. If this is desirable, we can say that all drafts, discussion and log entries in the DMS are therefore always transient.

Many of the potential procedures considered for supporting the records retention policy are not inherently supported in a DMS. An organization must determine whether the associated features are to be done manually according to a procedure, additions built in the DMS to support these requirements, or if a separate Records Management System (RMS) should be purchased and integrated. Some of these RMS features include:

• Maintaining the Record Retention Rules, Record Codes, Record Classes, and Record Names.
• Maintaining Hold Purposes.
• Linking records with the hold purposes and then assisting users with managing the hold process.
• Maintaining the owners, event dates, and time calculations for each record.
• Identifying records that have undetermined event dates or changes of ownership.
• Providing tools that assist users with the records review process.
• Compliance reporting.
• Issuing authorized delete requests in the DMS based on the retention schedule.
• Preventing unauthorized delete requests in DMS due to Holds.

The following list identifies features that should be implemented in the DMS that support RMS processes.

• Prevent replacement of a document version that is an official business record.
• Prevent deletion of official business records by "casual" users. Record Managers can delete.
• Track dates and times and who did what, which is used in the calculation for determining if a document is a candidate for deletion.
• Encourage deletion of transient records not needed for current business needs.
• Identification and deletion (possibly automatic) of transient records according to the Records Retention Policy.
• Association of a retention code with every document.
• Support searching for and finding candidate held documents.