Document Management Guidelines

The purpose of effective document management is quick location and retrieval of documents in a secure manner without any bottlenecks or errors. Without proper document management guidelines this objective is difficult to meet. Such guidelines have an important interface with different standards associated with various aspects of document management.

Most organizations outsource document management to specialist vendors.

When an organization does this, it will first draw up a technical specification which will incorporate document management guidelines. In the document management guidelines, it will incorporate these specific standards, compliance to which must be met completely by all vendors. It will send this specification along with its request for proposal (RFP) to qualified vendors.

The scope of this article will be to inform you the interface that document management guidelines has with these different standards.

Document management today is synonymous with electronic document management (EDM). Even EDM has been phased out by a newer term, namely electronic content management (ECM).

There are essentially five components/stages of effective EDM.

These are paper document capture through scanning and digital document creation on a computer, effective digital document storage on optical or magnetic media for quick retrieval, work flow process associated with an engineering document, application software used to manipulate a document, and distribution of a document through viewing, and plotting/printing.

Closely associated at every stage of the five mentioned above is the interlinked process of document management. Further, security aspects and intellectual property rights (IPR) aspects of CAD documents need to be also incorporated into the EDM guidelines that you devise.

Before you can lay down such EDM guidelines, you will need to become aware of the various standards that are associated with each of the above five stages.

The Association of Information and Image Management (AIIM) International, based in Silver Spring, Maryland, has provided information on these various document management standards and ISO document management standards.

The various standards are as follows.

Document imaging industry standards: These comprise ISO 10196:2003, ISO 12653-1:2000, ISO 12653-2:2000, ANSI/AIIM MS52-1991, ANSI/AIIM MS53-1993, and ANSI/AIIM MS55-1994.

As part of the management document storage standard suite, the various storage and archival standards are ANSI/AIIM TR41- 2006, ISO/IEC 17345:2004, ANSI INCITS 212-1992 (R2002) (ISO/IEC 10089:1991), ISO/IEC 13549-1993, ISO/IEC 11560:1992, ISO/IEC 14517:1996, ISO/IEC 15286:1999, ANSI INCITS 220-1992 (R2002) (ISO/IEC 11560:1992), and ANSI INCITS 234-1993 (R2003).

The various document management industry guidelines standards are ISO/TS 12022:2001, ISO/TR 12037:1998, ISO 12651:1999, ISO/DTR 12652, ISO 12653-1:2000, ISO 12653-2:2000, ISO/TR 12654:1997, ISO/TR 14105:2001, ISO 15801-2004, ANSI/AIIM TR2-1998, ANSI/AIIM TR15-1997, ANSI/AIIM TR21-1991, ANSI/AIIM TR25-1995, ANSI/AIIM TR27-1996 (being revised), ANSI/AIIM TR28-1991, ANSI/AIIM TR31-2004, ANSI/AIIM TR32-1994, ANSI/AIIM TR33-1998, ANSI/AIIM TR34-1996, ANSI/AIIM TR35-1995, ANSI/AIIM TR40-1995,

The templates for software configuration management document standard version must be compliant with ISO/IEC 12207 Amendments 1 and 2.

This article may have helped you to become aware of almost every document management standard that must be part of RFP technical specification document management guidelines sent to all EDM vendors.