DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (DMS)

DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (DMS)

Organizations tend to publish a variety of documents for internal consumption or for external sources such as suppliers, customers, and shareholders.

The volume of these documents to increase substantially each year and an urgent need to manage them adequately for efficient storage and retrieval.

DMS have developed to address these problems and have typically employed the intranet as an electronic medium rather than conventional document printing and circulation methods.

The primary driving forces have been the cost savings compared with conventional publication and distribution methods, together with the dynamics nature of intranets.

Documents can be published and updated on the internet when needed and become available instantly to all interested users (Frazee 1996).

Types of documents; policy and procedure manuals, corporate phone directors, online help, HR guidelines, sales and marketing literature, customer data, price lists and press release.

The ‘value-adding facilities of DMS may include:-

• Control to ensure only one user modifies a document at a time
• Audit trail to monitor changes in a document over time
• Security processes to control user access to documents
• Organization of documents into related groups and folders
• Identification and retrieval of documents according to text they contain (free-text searching)
•  Recording information associated with the document as Meta data such as author. Creation date and title
• Ability to route the documents from one user to another in a controlled fashion based on the workflow
• Converting paper documents into electronic format by scanning
• Organizing documents into groups to enable them to be distributed to target audiences

The process of implementing a DMS can be divided into number of phases, as shown in this table below:-

Some of the typical remaining organizational challenges presented by DMS have included;

• Privacy
• Currency of information
• Performance
• Security