A large amount of company computerization creates problems deriving from the vast amount of electronic document management. Studies now show that an user, on average, loses 30% of his time searching for documents, of which 80% of this time is lost because of insignificant documents.
These useless activities of document search creates a considerable loss of efficiency with respect to more significant and important working duties.
The use of document management technologies creates improved utility of important documents ensuring a considerable saving of time for company workers. Consequently, this improves output, saving of costs and, moreover, the assurance of obtaining a quick and significant Return-Of-Investment (ROI).
Document management technologies incorporate what are commonly called "search engines" and implement different search modes in the attempt to satisfy users' demands. The search for words or sentences, possibly expressed through Boolean logics, and search for author, title, dimension or date has now become a standard for these technologies.
Therefore, it is thanks to these tools that it is possible to classify documents in appropriate hierarchies, so increasing storage quality and the ability "to navigate" among various thematic document categories in a simple and operative way.
A question, commonly asked by clients to suppliers of these technologies, is –
" How do these tools find what is required "? The answer is: "By document indexation".
After these settings have been correctly installed onto the computer, the insertion of data into the "heart of the system", RDBMS, takes place by indexation. This activity occurs through processes which analyse the file-systems specified during the installation phase and they trace what is contained in them. At the end of these programs, normally batch processing, the database contains all the relative meta-data information and the documents physical location capable of providing the user with the required information. Most of these Knowledge Management Technologies offer two different strategies for document indexation. The first consists of executing some tasks at predefined time intervals, which have the task of verifying the presence of new files in the various file-systems and that automatically indexes them. This method is recommended in the case of large numbers of new document insertion and creation by the different users who use the system, due to the high number of resources for which this solution requires. The second method is manual indexation. From the point of view of resources, it is certainly less expensive with respect to the previous solution, but it is, above all, suitable if there is a limited quantity of new document production.
Another interesting topic in the context of document management is taxonomy. This terminology indicates a particular hierarchic structure, in which one leaves the generic categories to arrive the specific ones, and which divides the business domain into more specific subdomains. Taxonomies speed the search process up to 50% of the time normally requested, so considerably increasing the systems performance in the case of non-structured knowledge management. |
