We've been hearing that the paperless office is imminent, and we've been hearing it for years.

Things are getting better, but many practices continue to drown in a sea of paper. Fortunately, document management, workflow management, and related applications can offer even smaller firms a less paper-intensive office. Additionally, the right application can make storing, finding, handling and routing documents more efficient.

However, choosing the right application, getting it correctly configured and up and running, and maintaining it, isn't always easy. That's especially true for the many smaller practices whose IT department consists of a computer-literate staff member or two.

Approaching these applications, though, does not have to be intimidating. There are things you can do to maximize your acquisition and implementation efforts.

First, differentiate between workflow management and document management, which are sometimes used identically. For the most part, in both cases "documents" are being routed. With workflow management, these "documents" are routed to people. Sometimes this is done for the person receiving it to check it, approve it and send it off to a different person for additional processing. Some examples of this kind of workflow might be expense reimbursement or tax returns, both of which often have to be checked by one person or department, and then approved by a member of senior management. In a smaller practice, workflow management often has a somewhat different meaning - making sure that work is accomplished when it is supposed to be, by who is supposed to do it, and the work gets where it has to go (the client, the IRS, etc.).

With document management, the "document" needs to be captured, often converted into a different file format, and sent to the necessary recipients. With DM, those endpoints can be e-mails, file folders on network PCs, and, most frequently, a central database where they are abstracted, keywords are extracted, and a version number of the particular "document" assigned. In a larger practice, user rights - who has access to the document - may also be assigned. Document management, for the most part, is a collaborative tool. Staff know where "documents" are stored, what their contents are, how they can be retrieved, who has access to them, and if they have been modified.

The word "document" to this point has been in quotes. That's because it still needs to be defined. Most of us think of paper when we see the word "document," and many times a document will consist of a paper printout of a report, fax, e-mail, or Web page.

But it doesn't have to.

Perhaps a more accurate term for this application is "content management," because a document management system can usually handle much more than pieces of paper. In fact, for any document or workflow management system to operate, it first has to turn a paper document into an electronic file. This is usually accomplished by scanning the paper. If the contents of the paper are text, the image of the text is turned into a text file or a PDF (Portable Document Format) file by a process called optical character recognition.

• 1
• |
• 2
• |
• 3
• |
• 4
• |
• 5
• |
• 6
• |
• 7
• |
• next