Future of productivity: Documents

The first generation Document Management Systems (DMS) looked at a document in a classic way. It was a piece of paper, most of the time it really had a physical representation, even when 'stored' in the DMS. We believe a DMS helps to find information much faster, but we do not trust it to store important documents - we store them in a cabinet.

Still a lot of people look at a document this way, but the purpose of a document is changing rapidly. Information is accessed, collected, collaborated with and distributed in a much more fluid way. The document as we know it is dead.

We had a lot of control on our data sources, we even called these knowledge systems. Knowledge was the holy grail to better support the organization and to help it develop knowledge and support more productive processes. We were convinced we could manage these systems. The only thing we know however is that their should be a LOT of information in the system, but that's how close we often get to knowledge.

The first generation DMS took of in a time that the first word processors and spreadsheets became common. We stored most of these on a disk and now the network helped it to share it in a filesystem. We got lost and still are looking for a way out.

Email was meant to help us getting those nicely produced word and excel documents to another person. At first it worked brilliantly! We didn't have to walk over (and talk) to our colleague down the hall. 'Having' email was a privilege. The manager had mail access. He did not use it though, the assistent did. But when everybody had access to mail and a personal location to store data we discovered some drawbacks.

It got worse. We started to use email. We still use it in a way it is not meant. We try to support discussion and collaboration, while it only was meant to support the digital distribution of a message, like a digital postmen. When was the last time you talked to your postmen?

Bouncing around email with attachments like pingpong balls in a washing machine is not a good way to support communication and collaboration or to capture information that could be used to develop knowledge. Email systems evolved and now mimic a conversation in a thread. That looks oké from your point of view, but has no value at all when it comes to a conversation whithin a team.

Email systems even helped us to mimic the old fashion letter. Nice templates, fonts, pictures, it's all there. The email system became a wordprocessor and we used it like one. So now we have another source for our documents, don't we.

Some of us tried to start working with a DMS system the way it was meant to be or maybe better it has evolved to support the need of communication and collaboration. The DMS is dead, long live the DMS.

These systems look at communication and collaboration from the YOU point of view. Who are YOU talking to, what information do YOU need to fullfill your tasks, has someone sended YOU a letter about it.
From that starting point information sources and communication historie is assembled. It is shown in streams, social distance in your network to help you find information or knowledge more easy. The document is no longer the central object or source of information. The document is looked at in a way more conceptual way.

Structured data is often a central organized source. Central organized data does not guarantee quality, accessibility or being information however. Besides that...

...we know that information is not only stored in -structured- data (20%) but also in a way more non structured way (the other 80),

we often have no clue how to capture the information from it.

Development of technology took us by surprise (AGAIN). Today we quit mail (#WQM) and start to send over small text messages again. MICROblogs 'invented' by Evan Williams. The 140 char can be posted on a platform called Twitter.

So WQM and started to twitter, reaching a lot more people with neat tiny messages in one time, or snowballing messages to a big community. The platform has developed though and now we are able to shorten our messages by services like bit.ly making the message richer. Next we are also able to use services so we can extend our tweet length, we can attach files, photo's, use internal twitter services like Yammer that lack the 140 char boundary and so on. Brilliant we can hide a compleet document behind 140 characters or less!


You get the picture.

The neat start has become the next uncontainable source, looking to it from an information management perspective that is.

And if you think it is the only new form or source... think again. To make it easy for you, think about YouTube, Flickr, FaceBook and think these services combined...

Oh by the way, these are all services provided to you for free from The Cloud.