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ELECTRONIC
DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT
 THE TERM DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT is used in so many ways that confusion reigns when trying to describe what it really means. Is it a technology that is used to manage the distributed repositories of documents now dispersed throughout many organizations? Is it the set of technologies that enable organizations to disseminate information to their internal resources, their clients and their suppliers? Is it the set of technologies such as imaging and forms processing that allow organizations to input and retrieve these paper-based documents in a convenient way? Is it technologies like workflow and GroupWare that manage both the transaction-oriented and collaborative ways that documents need to be processed within an organization? Or is it the non-technical management issues that organizations need to address to effectively process their organizational memory? The answer is yes to all of these questions.
Document management is all this and more. Yes, document managers provide the products and services for revision control and repository-oriented services for the electronic documents located throughout an organization. The integration of imaging, workflow, Group Ware, document managers, optical character recognition tools and other technologies, together with realistic standards compliance and intelligent organizational management of these documents are what make up effective document management.
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INTRODUCTION
Relative to the advancement of IT industry, especially
in Sri Lanka, comparative use of document imaging technology
has been very poor. This paper is an effort to find out the
reasons behind the lack of usage, of this technology, and
to find more effective ways to use document imaging to improve
the overall productivity in the local context.
Knowledge represents a considerable driving resource in increasing
productivity. Time and Nature tests everything in its way,
a good example of preserved historical information is in stone
scripts of ancient Sri Lanka still standing through the natures
acid tests. Examining more closely these scripts, one could
see that preservation simply is not good enough for understanding
what is written in these stones, due to the lack of understanding
on the ancient scripts of our language.
Looking at today's picture, how many of our business documents,
electronic files such as word processor documents, spreadsheets
and other files will be available and readable in to the future?
That is of course if we could preserve that information. Also
we need to look at how efficiently do we utilize the information
within our current business processes?
This concludes that the robustness of information thus lie
on more than one factor, the physical preservation of information
and the preservation of underlying standards to enable the
comprehension of the information. |
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