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George Nicholson :: gnicholson@sagesol.com
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Take our Speed Survey on Document Management! |
In the course of a year, our firm interacts with 30-40 law firms, the majority of whom have a document management system (DMS). The DMS was implemented to bring order out of chaos; promote document sharing; avoid duplication; improve the quality of retained work product; etc. However, many firms find that rarely does the DMS meet these needs for the entire firm, at best only for individuals or a handful of groups.
When we probe further, we find that there are no suitable management processes surrounding the DMS. Even the most disciplined firms will have difficulty benefiting fully from a DMS if the database (profiles) and repository (the documents) are not maintained by a human resource. For other critical systems like accounting, individuals and departments are assigned to manage data and insure its accuracy. The same is true for Conflicts, Docketing, Records Management, etc. Yet for DMS, no one is minding the store. Why not assign an d individual to this task?
To get an appreciation for the value of this task, let’s look at how a DMS works. Everyone in the firm composes and edits documents using the DMS. When a document is saved, the author creates or updates a “profile,”—meaningful metadata that exists outside the document and describes it further. The metadata is limited to a dozen or so fields, the most common being Client, Matter, Author, Document Type and Date. The author is required to complete those fields or, lately, place the document in a folder that completes the profile for them. That metadata is stored in a database making it easy to search. The DMS can store and manage hundreds of thousands of documents, and can retrieve any document in seconds – if you can find it.
Problem s arise when you introduce people into the equation: they become complacent completing the profile and make mistakes, yielding profile errors and misfiled documents. Now users are unable to find documents because the profile data is inaccurate. Fortunately, the DMS supports full-text searching. Unfortunately, the list of documents returned becomes large and unwieldy, making the search difficult at best and useless at worst.