Friday, February 05, 2010
DMS is a lot more than digitization
Posted by:
Brian Pereira
A recent item in the news about missing maps caught my attention. The story cited how priceless maps of Mumbai, dating back to the 18th century had mysteriously disappeared from the “safe” confines of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai.
Here’s another true story. An army officer’s widow had trouble claiming her husband’s pension because she could not remember the Pension Payment Order; apparently this was the only way it could be tracked in the non-digitized system.
Both incidents could have been averted had the documents been digitized. But how could one digitize maps closer to the 18th century? The technology to do so was a long way from being invented.
Well, DMS or document management systems are not a recent concept. Digitization is just a new way of doing this. DMS can be traced back to the 1940s, when newspapers and print media companies applied imaging techniques to preserve physical paper-based documents for posterity.
However, DMS has evolved much since then to suit changing enterprise environments.
In today’s context, a document does not necessarily refer to a paper-based document. Events can be recorded using other formats such as audio, video, and animation. Users are exchanging Podcasts, graphics, video and audio clips; PowerPoint and PDF files using e-mail or pen drives. We have more user-generated content than ever before, and this throws up new challenges like explosive growth of unstructured data and duplication of data.
Then there are institutions, especially in the media and government sectors, which are digitizing millions of physical documents.
And documents are no longer stored on volumes within the enterprise; some prefer to store documents in the cloud, where these can be accessed from any part of the globe.
All this has caused DMS to evolve further. DMS is gradually becoming an Enterprise Content Management system (ECM). And industry people are now talking about the benefits of cloud-based solutions.