Document Sharing Without Document Management - Going Without But Feeling With
- Dr. Moria Levy
- Jul 31, 2004
- 5 min read
Co-authored with Uri Ginzburg
Who among us, as a manager or employee, hasn't encountered, more than once, the desire to retrieve documents that were written in the organization, that we're sure were written, but no one can locate them? Who hasn't encountered such a situation, even with our documents?
Most organizations want to organize their documents better as part of knowledge management or as an efficiency issue. Documented knowledge is abundant and continues to grow over the years. Content management solutions, as well as insight management solutions, cannot serve as substitutes for document organization and management, as they require processing and management of each piece of information and are therefore only suitable for limited groups of information.
Formal document management solutions have always existed. About ten years ago and more, they were sold under the banner of quality and document control. Today, these software solutions are experiencing renewed popularity due to an understanding of the importance of document sharing as another means of "not reinventing the wheel." Today, as in the past, it is very difficult to implement such systems in an organization. Changing work habits that require "uploading and loading" a document to another area is not trivial, and in practice, the tools succeed mainly in executive offices and advanced project environments. An additional difficulty in implementing such tools exists in small and medium-sized organizations (50-500 people) where the investment required to maintain document management tools exceeds their capacity. There are very few IT personnel in some organizations, and document management software means a server, database, backups, and more. People vote with their feet, most organizations do not manage documents, and most of those claiming to manage documents have a very low level of tool implementation.
So, how can documents be shared in a small organization without document management tools?
Or, similar to the famous saying (in reverse), how can you go without but feel with?
To give a good answer, we must first define the required knowledge sharing needs:
Working with uniform trees: When an employee is in a defined project environment, the hierarchical tree structure in which they save documents should be uniform with that of other projects. Uniformity facilitates orientation. Uniformity makes it easier for project managers to define a new project environment. Uniformity is a stage for procedural guidance, templates, and increased accessibility. And finally, uniformity is not just for the project environment but for any process shared across multiple places in the organization: working with customers, developing training, management, and more.
Managing sharing attributes: Trees, as good and uniform as they may be, do not provide an adequate solution for cross-cutting horizontal searches. If a user, for example, wants to create a new test planning document and use existing ones, they need to access all "test planning" documents in the various projects. To do so, they must "go up and down" between the different trees (which are indeed in a uniform structure) to reach all the relevant documents. Most users won't bother to do this work and will take the first example they come across, which is not necessarily the best one for them. Managing sharing attributes for each document allows for a single search operation and access to all documents simultaneously. This is true when the documents are in the same subtree in different trees (project/testing phase/document name), but equally true when the attribute is not reflected in the subtree where it is located. For example, a user wants to access all documents related to a specific technology across projects. Or: a user wants to access all customer service plan documents, etc.
Connection between trees and attributes: Trees represent a hierarchical structure that indicates the properties and context of the document. So do organizational attributes. Ultimately, in many cases, there is significant overlap between the content of attributes and trees. Not complete overlap, but certainly significant. An organization seeking to share documents wants to ensure automated management of this relationship. Management that will save work for the user (why declare the document's context twice?), but no less importantly, will save contradictions that can arise from the double work.
Minimum change in user work habits: One of the main reasons for the failure of classic document management systems is the necessity to change work habits for the save operation (and sometimes for document access). Advanced tools solve this by creating an interface within Office that allows saving in the designated location. Good but not always sufficient. The user is accustomed to saving their documents on the network. Moreover, many users save their documents in a personal environment because of the existing organizational culture (transferring to a shared area means a document has already been processed and approved) or because they work with a laptop. They should be allowed to save in the usual place, using the usual buttons. They should be allowed to tag the document (saving in a recommended location and providing attributes that define the document's context) as they are accustomed to it.
They should be allowed to do minimal work during tagging:
The tagging window should appear as part of the regular save operation and not as a separate button that requires "remembering" to save in shared mode.
Suggest a list of values for each attribute (list of customers, technologies, projects, etc.). This way, the user needs fewer deliberations, and the tagging work is fast and uniform (no problem with different spellings for different users).
Recognition of the user profile to save them from constant association (for example, linking to a specific customer or project as default).
Fixed relationship between attributes. If a user is in a certain department, the list of projects to which they can associate documents is limited, and there is no need to see the list of projects for the entire organization when saving. Moreover, if a user previously specified a project name, the system should infer which department it is associated with and save them from the above tagging.
Relationship between attributes and trees. As stated above, if a user tagged the document (associated it with attribute values), they should be recommended a suitable uniform tree. If they don't have such a tree (a new training course they're building, for example), the appropriate tree should be created for them, helping them while they help with sharing.
All these allow for simple saving. This is usually the problem. Everyone wants to retrieve, but it's a bit difficult for them to save. Any document sharing solution should allow searching across all drives or defined trees for desired information, using sharing attributes. Another small advantage of saving in the natural environment is that even documents that were saved before the system, those that were saved bypassing it (and there will always be such), or those that were moved from their place are all retrievable. Perhaps less successful retrieval (since there are no attributes), but accessible through the same shared search interface.
Does it sound like a far-fetched dream? Maybe. But the technology already allows it, and all that's needed is to adopt an existing tool or develop one independently. As the saying goes, going without but feeling with.
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