by John Barton
There has been a great deal of conversation recently, both within Document Control chat rooms on the web and within the Institute of Document Control over the right definitions of Document Control and Document Management.
Definitions matter and I for one would like to see more debate, if not consensus among the Document Control community because a united front will ultimately help others understand what we do and why we should be recognised as specialists.
There has been a great deal of conversation recently, both within Document Control chat rooms on the web and within the Institute of Document Control over the right definitions of Document Control and Document Management.
Definitions matter and I for one would like to see more debate, if not consensus among the Document Control community because a united front will ultimately help others understand what we do and why we should be recognised as specialists.
In particular, if we can get across the little understood difference between Document Control and content management or generic business document management, then we can get across the fact that the processes, technology and skills required to do each of them also differs. Who knows, we might even be resourced properly on our next job!
In my opinion Document Control is fundamentally about traceability; it is about capturing every detail about what happens to documents and drawings as they move from point A to point B. This is essential on engineering projects in particular, where an audit trail is required for the circulation of technical documents and drawings (deliverables) through, for example, revision and approval cycles and issuance to third parties. An adequate audit trail is a cornerstone of project management because it allows progress to be monitored. It is also essential when deliverables have been handed over to the owner / operator of the asset to support its ongoing operation. Finally, when there is reason to search the archive records to investigate what happened at a critical stage of the project lifecycle, adequate Document Control can for example disprove that delays and re-work were caused by untimely issue of information.
I like to make an analogy between Document Control and the postal system. You can do what you like with the content of a document during authorship, including collaboration without constraint but at some point, for example to meet a contractual deadline, the finished version needs to be transferred to another party inside or outside of the organisation. It gets assigned an ‘address’ in the agreed number structure format (which tells you not only where the document is scheduled to go but its type and where is from so its movement and permutations can be tracked) and submitted to Document Control (i.e. posted) to be logged, tracked and delivered.
Generic business document management on the other hand is about a much more widely applicable set of practices such as document storage and retrieval, where traceability is not the priority, there are no revision cycles or status changes and distribution is far simpler. Moreover virtual electronic filing cabinets, a.k.a. content management systems, are wholly inadequate for the task of document control, which requires specialist database technology.
To recap, Document Control requires particular processes, specialist technology and dedicated personnel. The sooner the various industries within which we work realise this, the sooner they will be able to mitigate project risks and deliver on time and to budget.
