KnowledgeBlog

In this day and age we are very capable of producing vast reams of information. 30 years ago if you wanted to write something you would need to get out the typewriter and feed in some paper. If you wanted someone else to read it you’d post your message in the mail or fax it. If you wanted a lot of people to read it you’d need to write into a paper or in the case of a company, publish it as part of a newsletter.

Today you can easily write something in a program such as OpenOffice Writer and put it up on the company Intranet and share it with everyone instantaneously. This new found accessibility to content is a boon for managing company policies and procedures and giving staff what they need when they need it. However the obvious advantage comes with some less obvious disadvantages. Just ask someone who manages a local Intranet/Document Management system what happens over a few years. Firstly there is a great deal of thought put into how people store, search for and collect documentation. Then, over time, the advantage of having many contributors becomes a problem as the original vision of how documents ought to be structured becomes fragmented due either new staff misunderstanding the structure, or the original inventors being unable to see all the categories that are eventually needed.

The fragmentation of the document structure also contributes to another problem. That is one of relevancy. Documents that are authored now may become irrelevant in the future due to various reasons. For example a policy document is no longer required because its content has been subsumed by another document. Therefore the old policy document turning up in search results may create a problem of compliance. So the old policy document is no longer relevant. However, it may also be that the old document must be kept for legal reasons. For example if the organisation is a party in a dispute it may be required to deliver documents that show the policies and procedures at the time that the dispute first arose. The costs of E-Discovery are a burden on the organisation.

So we have a quandary, we don’t want old documents to pollute the search results of our Document Management System, and yet we may need to keep some of these no-longer-relevant documents.

The answer to this quandary is to incorporate document life cycle management into your document management procedures. Document lifecycle management recognises that authors create documents with all the best intentions of informing and guiding colleagues, however their documents, and those created by outside parties, are not all equal in their value or life-expectancy. The challenge for corporate document and record managers is to build ways of managing the importance and life-expectancy of documents.

We think that a good response to the record-keeping relevancy dilemma is to break the task down to:

1. Identification;
2. Classification;
3. Execution; and
4. Review.

Identification means identifying the type of documents that you manage. Classification then means creating record-types, and associated life-cycle rules, to represent and manage your documents. Execution is around how rules are processed when they need to be run. Review pertains to how document and record managers can review the state of their document environment such as the last set of executed rules or any upcoming rules.

This type of framework puts some boundaries on document relevancy and gives the document administrators a basis for ensuring good document governance. Of course it is optimal, and far-sighted, to implement such a framework at the start of a document management implementation, but if there isn’t such an opportunity then the best time is simply now.