All organizations have documents. Many have elaborate document management solutions that facilitate the capture, storage, management, and delivery of those documents to meet the needs of their business operations. Some have very informal or even manual approaches that meet their needs. Regardless of the type or size of an organization, their documents progress through defined lifecycles from the time they are created or received, to the time the documents may legally be destroyed. The following four considerations are essential to ensuring long-term success of an organization’s business operations and the document management approach that supports the business:
- Effective and consistent capture and classification
- Management and processing
- Delivery, formatting, and presentation
- Storage, retention, and disposition

For the purposes of this article, we will focus on more traditional document management solutions vs. manual approaches to ensure there is a consistent baseline without the need to address special handling needs for paper-based documents. However, please note that most of the concepts can be applied directly to paper-based solutions as well as electronic ones.

#1: Effective and Consistent Capture and Classification
All documents have to start somewhere. Some are created by typing information into software applications like Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, while others are generated by applications like customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), or another line-of-business (LOB) application. Additionally, all documents may be received as a paper document from outside the organization. Regardless of how the document was created, or who created it, it needs to be collected and identified consistently so that it may handled according to the organization’s standard operating procedures (SOPs).

The classification of documents is usually done via associating metadata (data about the document) to the document, or as otherwise known, indexing the document. This tagging of the document with pre-defined categories of information allows for the document to be identified later in its lifecycle so that the appropriate policies, processing, and disposition can be carried out. Metadata fields are usually kept to a minimum to uniquely identify the document. Other associated information related to the document is best stored and managed externally from the document metadata in a line-of-business (LOB) application solution, and linked to the document’s unique identifier. A prime example is an invoice document that may be classified with an Invoice Number, Invoice Date, Vendor Number, and Purchase Order Number, whereas all of the related information about the vendor, purchase order, items being purchased, costs and prices, requestor, prior approvals, and other information is stored in the appropriate accounting and financial applications.

#2: Management and Processing
Once a document is captured and classified, it needs to be managed so that the appropriate people or systems may access it for transactional processing, for secondary business needs like e-discovery, and for other processing needs like review and final approval.

Management of the document usually provides for assigning the document’s lifecycle, security access controls, key features like version control and virtual document management, and short-term storage management. Processing sometimes entails the initiation of an automated workflow that manages the steps involved in performing the right actions on the right documents by the right people at the right time. If processing is NOT automated, people manually perform the activities to process the documents based upon their generally accepted practices.

#3: Delivery, Formatting, and Presentation
Documents need to be viewed for various purposes. In the case of an invoice document received for payment, the document is accessed to process the document for review/approval, and for payment. The document must be delivered from its storage location to the device that the person is using to process the transaction. The delivery is accomplished via underlying transport protocols, but is initiated by a person’s request.

Formatting of the documents is done to meet several needs. The primary need is usually to view the document, but also to provide the document in a format that is generally accessible for use in several areas, such as read-only situations, for publishing to broad audiences, or for long-term storage fidelity.

Presentation of documents has historically been to a PC or Laptop monitor. With the advent of mobile computing, many smaller devices are being used in organizational processes to facilitate rapid completion of activities. Presentation of documents to these mobile devices is now a critical success factor for delivery and presentation of documents within and across organizations. Document formats need to be flexible to support such presentation as well as long-term storage needs.

#4: Storage, Retention, and Disposition
Storage management related to documents is no longer a simple “put it on the file server” decision. As the global market opens to even the smallest of companies; distributed, federated, and cached solutions for document storage must be assessed to meet usability and performance needs of a global population of users. The latest approach for document storage “In the Cloud” provides for virtualized storage management and is being considered by many organizations. Considerations here include the sensitivity of the documents if accessed by audiences outside the expected populations, and the synchronization of company-specific metadata that is needed to be related to the documents.

Retention policies are needed to determine how long each type of document should be kept and under what conditions they are eligible for being retired. Once these policies are associated to the document, usually via the document type and other criteria during the document lifecycle, they will be retained and accessible for secondary business purposes. Once the retention period has expired, documents are eligible to be disposed of.

Disposition of documents can be performed via a very controlled and automated process, or can be completely manual. Workflows are used to automate the review, approval, and, in some cases, deletion of documents that are eligible for destruction. A key consideration related to the deletion of content is the identification of the steward of the document types, and ensuring they have the authority to make such a determination.

Understanding: The Key to Long-Term Success
The overarching key to the appropriate document management approach for an organization involves the balance of understanding the documents, the progression through their lifecycles, how and where they are stored and accessed, and the organization’s policies for retaining and disposing of the documents in a timely fashion.

Once these considerations are determined, governance may be enacted to ensure that additions to the organization’s policies, procedures, and best practices are maintained in a consistent and effective fashion moving forward. This will provide the foundation for long-term success in any document management endeavor.

Allan P. Spina, MIT, (908-852-1019 or allanspina@iaassociates.net) is the founding Principal of Information Asset Associates, LLC, an organization that is focused on the advancement of document imaging, document management, workflow, BPM, and collaborative applications and architectures. Allan has been an AIIM member since 1988, and has held various offices for the Garden State Chapter of AIIM; and has been the Treasurer since 2000. Allan is also one of the earliest recipients of the Master of Information Technology Certification from AIIM International, receiving this designation in 1999.