Document Management vs. Content Management vs. Knowledge Management Part 1 – Understanding Document Management

4th April, 2009 - Posted by Sean R. Nicholson - 1 Comment

Sean R. Nicholson

Document Management, Content Management, and Knowledge Management are three very nebulous terms that get thrown around a lot when discussing the functionality and requirements of an Intranet. Unfortunately, concrete definitions of these terms are hard to come by since the terms often mean different things to different organizations. In an effort to build a common understanding of the terms, let’s break down each of the terms and look closely at how they inter-relate. The first article in this series focuses specifically on Document Management.

Document Management – Capturing, Storing, And Routing Containers Of Information

Document management is a common term that most folks in today’s workplace are familiar with. Think of all of the Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents that you have stored on your local workstation. By simply creating, storing, and deleting those documents you are engaging in the simplest form of document management. Simple, right?

The complexity of managing documents grows significantly, however, when you have hundreds or thousands of document creators in the same organization. As the number of documents needing management grows, issues such as the following arise:

• Where do we store all these documents?
• What happens if we don’t centralize them and someone loses a workstation? Can we replace those documents?
• What security risks are presented by allowing documents to be stored on workstations?
• How do we find the documents that we need?
• How can we secure documents so that only specific individuals or groups can see them?
• How do we keep people from recreating the same document over and over?
• How do we move documents from person to person electronically?
• Is there a way to make documents go away automatically according to our retention schedules?

If you take a look at those questions, they primarily focus on how you manage the container we call a “document”, not the content inside of it. In most cases, the content tools used to create and edit the information inside the containers has been selected. ..these tools are the Content Management tools, which we’ll discuss later in this series.

Document Management Systems vs. File Shares

So when thinking about documents and the document management needs of a large group of document contributors, organizations often look for ways to store the documents centrally, pass them around the organization, secure them appropriately, and discard them when their useful life has expired. Organizations usually look to file shares (a virtual drive mapped to your computer often designated with a letter like your “F: drive”) to serve as their initial document management system, and they do serve a useful purpose…up to a point.

For small groups file shares provide a common location to save and share documents. A document creator saves it to a folder in the share and then tells others about it by either sending the link on the share via email or verbally. The difficulties with file shares present themselves as the number of users relying on the documents grow. Common issues include:

• Difficulty in applying permissions to specific documents. File shares do folder permissions well, but not file-level permissions.
• File shares do not allow for check in/check out functionality.
• Searching across file shares can be a slow process as the number of folders and documents increase.
• Documents get “stale” if the owners do not constantly update or clean up their documents
• The size of a file share can quickly get out of hand if no one monitors that number of documents that are stored there

As a result of these deficiencies, growing organizations sometimes break apart these file shares into logical clusters like an F: drive for marketing, a G: drive for Sales, and a T: drive for IT. The problem, however, is that this practice now silos documents and makes them difficult to collaborate around. When the Marketing person can’t access the Sales share, the answer is to attach documents to emails and send them, which creates a nightmare as to which version is most current, how are changes to documents merged into the parent document, and more. What happens is that growing organizations usually outgrow file shares relatively quickly and look to Document Management Systems to bring that decentralized information back together to provide a common management system.

What Do Organizations Look For In A Document Management System?

In response to the shortcomings of file shares, the requirements usually sought after in enterprise-level document management systems often look something like:

• The ability to store documents in a variety of formats captured from imaging devices, created by desktop productivity applications (e.g. MS Office), and generated by other enterprise applications.
• The ability for administrators to define and enforce a common folder structure (often referred to as a taxonomy).
• The ability for end-users to add documents and sub folders to the repository using a browser-based interface or integration with productivity applications like Microsoft Word or Excel.
• The ability to move documents from user to user using workflow capabilities.
• The ability to perform full text searches against the documents in the system.
• The ability to remind users to review documents on a periodic basis to keep documents up to date.
• The ability to delete documents from the system according to a retention period.

Again, the focus is primarily on the capture, storage, and management of the containers. With the exception of being able to search the content and sometimes route through workflow, document management usually doesn’t really focus on what’s in the document, just that the document can be stored, moved around, accessed, and managed.

When organizations start looking at the content inside the document and how to create, review, and update content the focus often shifts from document management to content management, which leads us to the next topic in the series.

COMING SOON – Document Management vs. Content Management vs. Knowledge Management  Part 2 – Understanding Content Management