Thanks to Paula, Matt, Suzy, Marc and Oliver for your comments and
attachments which have given me quite a bit to think about.
I take the main points that an EDRMS is not quite as simple as it seems and
that the majority of the effort required in implementation and use comes with
the preparatory work, the training and the maintenance. I cannot agree with
Paula that because there are less players in the market that the market is
shrinking … (IBM - Microsoft?) I think the market will grow hugely and that
costs must tumble.
As you may have surmised, I work in local government and what drives my
current thoughts is watching and trying to usefully participate in the
implementation of an EDRM solution in our Local Authority. Good practice
seems to have dictated that we try to use a single large “corporate” EDRMS
and adopt a fileplan based on the Local Government Classification Scheme.
This approach involves each service area trying to reconcile our multifarious
needs in respect of file structure and metadata and try to load our documents
with some sort of common good practice. The “front end” for the retrieval of
documents would presumably then be a direct interface with the EDRMS
bringing up results which will be only as well differentiated as the metadata
which we have time to apply. This is all very labour intensive and I am not
convinced that it is time well spent.
I see other problems with the approach apart from the sheer amount of work
involved in the creation of the file structure and in applying sufficient
metadata to make the content properly searchable. We could file address
based case records on a file structure based on folders for each address but
this could possibly suffer from duplication as in:
102 Willowbrook Rd
102 Willowbrook Road
102 Willow Brook Road
….. etc etc with every persons idea of how that address is spelled/ formatted
or every mistake potentially creating a separate folder (NB I have often seen
such variation within documents) This possible duplication of folders for a
single address is a problem and therefore the wish to base a file structure on
UNRN instead (because of the U = Unique)
This then raises further problems of how to search or browse for documents in
a non-intuitive structure. Would you now have to go into the case
management software to search for the UPRN to then look for a folder in the
EDRMS or do you have to take the time to manually add the relevant
metadata to locate the case which again could contain the same mistakes you
were trying to avoid in the folder naming?
If, as I surmise, EDRMS's will become significantly cheaper (if only to compete
with Sharepoint), surely it is best for each Case Management suite to have a
possibly basic but fully integrated documant management system at the back
of it. The case management software already contains all of the metadata and
the search facilities you should need including facilities to find documents
associated with a case, the linking of cases to an address and the linking of
the address to further cases etc. It would require a considerable amount of
applied metadata to allow the “corporate” EDRM system to do all of this.
If all these various small EDRMS’s were allocated folder structures representing
an appropriate portion of the LGCS for their relevant service area and they all
had a common architecture and could output content together with xml
metadata, you could later merge or split data as you wished to accommodate
changes in organisational structure. Many CRM and Workflow applications
already have bolt on EDRMS solutions supplied by their vendors which we
could encourage vendors to develop towards common interoperability
standards. Most of these software packages also have pretty good access
control and retention could be as simple as delete all cases and associated
rerords before XX/XX/XXXX Date.
I see this as a more likely start on the long road to success than trying to get
your IT dept or a single company to sort out adapters to a wide range of
disparate systems while huge backlogs of uncaptured information build up. Our
potentially wonderful (allegedly) corporate EDRMS is virtually useless until we
can work out how to apply large amounts of metadata and/or integrate it with
existing systems.
Again … comment welcome.
Regards,
Martin
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