Have you heard the story about the blindfolded people, each given a part of an elephant to touch and are then asked to describe the rest of the animal? The person at the tail describes a very different animal than the person at the ears or the one at the feet and so on. Well, except for the fact that we’re not wearing blindfolds, we’re in pretty much the same situation when it comes to discussing document management. All the questions you ask about document management and the answers you receive reflect yours or the vendor’s perspective.

The first question you might want to ask is why do I care about document management? There are two simple answers, your bottom line and compliance. Unfortunately, and after talking to representatives from Anacomp, EMC Corporation, FileNet Corporation, The Gilbane Group Inc., Hyland Software Inc, IBM Corporation, Vignette Corporation, and Xerox Corporation, it is clear that these are the last simple answers you’ll get.

The trouble starts when defining the word document—you need to know what you’re managing, right? Most of us still think of documents from a paper-based perspective. Corey Meitchik, senior VP of worldwide sales and marketing for Anacomp—headquartered in San Diego, CA—offers this, "You could define a document in lots of different ways. Typically the most visual representation of a document is a final form document."

Mietchik gives examples such as contracts, patient records, insurance policies, and bank statements. "For example, I might have all my bank statements for the past year foldered together as a single document. I might also have pictures of the back of my checks and those could be included as part of my bank statement document or the pictures could be foldered together to create another document. It all depends on how I, or an organization, define my documents."

Naomi Miller, director of content management products at EMC—headquartered in Hopkinton, MA—points out, "Whether it’s paper or digital, a document is an item that conveys information. Further, content is the information contained in the document, or some other medium, like a Web page."

The fact is that people—vendors, analysts, and customers—are straddling the divide between paper and electronic, digital, or virtual worlds and the vocabulary often increases the divide. "Many people use the term ‘content’ because it seems broader. After all, since everyone is a publisher, what does ‘document’ mean any more? Now, it encompasses everything from a business document to HTML and XML files to audio and video and even to structured data in a relational database," says Leonor Ciarlone, senior analyst for The Gilbane Group—based in Cambridge, MA.

Still, document management systems have been around for about ten to 20 years, depending on whom you talk to. Martyn Christian, CMO for FileNet, states, "Businesses of a certain size have at least one [document management system] and the larger organizations have more than one and [in some cases] have many more than one. We see a natural split around about 2,000 employees and $500 M in revenue [so] companies larger than that typically have at least one or more investments in document management technology and other associated adjacent technologies."

When document management systems were being implemented, there was an assumption that offices would become paperless and document management was an enabling technology. It didn’t quite work out as planned. Xerox’s Smarter Document Management in the Office white paper quotes this statistic, "According to IDC, offices around the world will produce 4.5 trillion pages of hardcopy information by 2007," from The Role of Documents in Effective Business Processes, Angele Boyd, IDC, October 2004.

The reality is that documents flow back and forth across the divide between the paper and electronic worlds, which is why a lot of people think of document management as a digitizing process. However, it is much more than that, it is also an attempt to apply controls.

With the advent of computers, document creation became ridiculously easy. Version control was unheard of and check in/check out processes, permissions, full-test indexing, and the ability to route an electronic document for approval—both formally and in an ad hoc fashion—were similarly undeveloped. So, document management systems were created and implemented.

Still, technology keeps morphing and workflow applications have made their way into the mix. Debbie Black, IBM senior manager, business planning and strategy, describes the software this way, "A workflow application takes a [business] process that happens over and over with some level of predictability and automates it."

Workflow applications have sped up business processes while document management has allowed organizations to manage it all. Christian from FileNet offers an example of a mid-size financial services institution that reengineered a 60-step, formerly paperbound, mortgage loan process down to 30 steps, using FileNet’s document management and workflow business management capabilities. "They were able to move things from A to B automatically; they were able to pre-select documents to present to people automatically and they were able to increase their productivity substantially which allowed them to price their services lower and really compete very aggressively in their chosen market sector."

With people moving things around electronically they need new ways to collaborate. Jon Palin, director of the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Suite for Vignette—headquartered in Austin, TX, gives an example of an emerging ‘best practice.’ "Rather than having documents being tightly controlled, you’re now moving to a situation where you can have many people allowed to edit a document and, provided you track and have appropriate review cycles, that will naturally tend to the most balanced output."

Palin’s example of a product manual should strike a chord with any reader who’s struggled with a manual that doesn’t correspond exactly to the software on their computer screen. "Rather than only one person being able to edit the product manuals, allowing customer care and call center staff to edit and update as they find errors is really quite powerful and adds efficiency around those types of documents." It’s not common practice yet but it illustrates how people can reach across the silos that exist in all organizations.

Of course, when you add people to the situation you encounter resistance to this new world of collaboration and sped up processes. Black at IBM says, "Other than telling an individual that instead of looking at ten documents a day, now I want you to look at 150. How do you help the company process all that information? You find a smart way to automate the processes and use people, your expensive resources, at just the right time."

Point well taken; timing is essential in all things including purchase and upgrade decisions. Here are some of the warning signals: one, you can’t find the information or it takes too long and productivity is suffering. Two, you’re losing business because your competitors are able to offer the same service faster and cheaper. Three, a regulator is knocking on your door and you don’t want your business to halt while you locate the required information. Four, a lawyer is knocking on your door and you don’t want be bankrupted by the legal discovery process. Five, a natural disaster is headed to town and you are in the line of destruction.

That last instance rings true to Ken Burns, industry analyst relations manager at Hyland Software—headquartered in Westlake, OH. One of Hyland’s customers, a Mississippi-based bank came within one floor of losing the documents that represent the lifeblood of their organization. The bank had 8.7 million documents stored on the second floor of a building about to be flooded during Hurricane Katrina. The floodwaters subsided before reaching the second floor, but the crisis brought home the importance of having an effective document management and storage strategy.

Now that you’ve chosen to implement a document management system, you still need to decide between keeping it in-house or outsourcing. Mietchik at Anacomp makes a compelling argument for outsourcing. "This is all we do. We’re a document management or ECM vendor or whatever you want to call us. We have to keep pace with technology because we have to keep up with what’s in the marketplace today. So, if you’re a customer of ours from three years ago, you upgrade at the same time we do. And, we’re constantly upgrading and buying new technology."

Decision making doesn’t end with in-house or outsourcing, you have to consider scalability, cost to operate, and cost and speed of implementations—initial and upgrades.

Miller from EMC provides more insights, "Companies can increase efficiency by choosing a solution that captures more information from more sources—paper, fax, Web, and email—and applies identical business rules to both electronic and print data streams. It’s also easiest to use a solution that leverages standard, supported platform and integration technologies rather than a solution that uses proprietary, custom-developed code."

While determining your current needs, project into the future as best you can. Colman Murphy, product manager for the DocuShare Business Unit at Xerox, notes, "We offer basic content service capabilities, and for organizations that require advanced capabilities in addition to their basic requirements we have developed a new product which includes content process automation and live social collaboration."

Murphy and the Xerox DocuShare group worked with a team at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on a project they call the Knowledge Network. It’s a system for taking documents and content, and breaking it down into discrete components. For example, take a sentence or a paragraph, apply an XML tag, and store the component, sentence, or paragraph, into a repository. The component can now be retrieved and reused by anyone in the organization with appropriate access.

How many times have you produced a document or done some work that you know is redundant but you can’t find the relevant information? Anyone who’s ever done this only to find the original, relevant information mere minutes after completing the project immediately grasps the rewards of such a system.

From the vendors’ and analysts’ perspectives, the possibilities are tantalizingly close, but all are aware that there is a plethora of systems and terminology leading to a fair degree of confusion in the marketplace. One of the more popular ways of determining your requirements is to first determine your primary activities and desired business outcome.

Burns at Hyland Software recommends an analytical model developed by Forrester Research, The Forrester Wave: Content-Centric Applications, Q1 2006, by Kyle McNabb. They break down content applications into three categories, transactional content applications, business content applications, and persuasive content applications—for example, company Web sites, catalogues, and email notices.

Other analytical models may suit you better, or you may find that you need more than one model to see the whole elephant and decide which parts are important to you. Once you’ve determined the type of information or content that your organization—both on global and departmental levels—needs to manage, then you need to make some decisions about your document management system. Assuming of course that you want your business to survive.