Financial & Travel Musings

Between one thing and another I ended up becoming something of an expert on the in-house document management system over a number of years.

Are they worth doing though? Well, at the outset I’d have said that it was a definite “no”. After all, there’s quite a bit of work to be done before you get any benefit from such a system. Whilst it’s clearly a good idea to be able to find things and certainly handy to be able to pull up the documents onscreen rather than hunting through a whole bunch of files to find something, there’s quite an effort to go through before you reach that stage. For one thing, it takes time to enter a document into the system with a minute or two to scan documents and adding all the meta-information in the form of dates, titles, keywords and so on.

Moreover there’s the problem that you don’t get any of the advantages for a few months (how long the delay is depends on your business) so you’re plugging away for ages before you can really see why. Sure, you could process all the historical documents and get the advantages sooner but few people have the time, money or inclination to do that.

Once you get over that hump you soon wonder how you did without the system. The only problem then is that it becomes increasingly difficult to find documents that predate the system which for many means a period of a few months more ’til those historical documents cease to be quite so relevant.

So, very worthwhile doing but put some thought into how you’ll motivate staff to enter details for the several months it takes before the system becomes one of those “can’t do without it” systems.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 at 10:12 am and is filed under Computers, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.