Document Management is equivalent to the Rotary Phone.

How many people do you know who are still using a Rotary Phone?

Why are we still managing documents? Say what? Where are you going with this you may ask…

Think about it. The rotary phone died because it was dumb. It was an effort to dial vs. pushing a button.

You could only dial one person. You couldn’t conference someone in to the same call.

The same is true of Document Management. You have a document that may be 1 page or 10’s of pages or 100’s of pages long, yet, who can edit it – just 1 person, you’re one on one with that document just like the old rotary phone.

Oh but there is so much more that you can do with document management you may say, you can add comments and talk about it… ya, I did that with my rotary phone too. I’d dial-up another person and gossip about what we just talked about.

Think about it, the data in the document is there to be shared, it is to be worked on, it is to be active, yet we just have a dumb old rotary phone, aka current document management.

You see when we look at a broader context of communication, the phone has died too. We aren’t doing massive conference calls with all of our friends. No, we have group texts, WeChat, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat stories, House Party apps and so many more that I am sure that I have missed. We can collaborate en masse…..

So why are we maintaining these silly structures for document management…

CONTENT THOU SHALL BE FREED FROM THE CONFINES OF DOCUMENTS!!!

Phew, I feel better now…. So what comes next.

Well the structure of content should be able to managed as just that, content. It should be able to be deconstructed and reassembled at any point in time and in anyway. We should be able to understand the associativity between usage of content so that if we want to consume like changes that may have been updated in other contexts that are relevant that we can do so.

Whoa, whoa… slow down… in other words.

I wrote something relevant – a specification, a label, a description, a definition, etc.

I want to define it once but use it often – I do this but referencing the original vs. copying and pasting which severs any association (common practice today).

If a referenced location gets update – aka branched – I can determine if I want to adopt it or keep the original – aka merging.

Oh, and for each content snippet, ya, I can collaborate around that individual piece. Imagine if you could only comment about a person’s entire picture board of the events for a year on Facebook vs. an individual post. It sounds silly, right, but this is exactly what we do with Document Management – aka dumb.

The world has become too interconnected to have documents where you can’t define the linkage across content. You don’t do this in your normal life on social media. You don’t do this as you look at your customer’s across channels. You would never use your Rotary Phone as your “go to” device.

So the next time you think about having document and starting to manage it in one of your pervasive document management systems, you may want to think of giving us at XPERIX a call.

We’ll modernize the way that you think of your content with a quick 30 minute demo of Polarion.

You’ll put down your Rotary Phone and never want to touch again…

BTW – we can still produce a “document” for you if you want some nostalgia.

Contact me at brian.vince@xperix.io to ditch your rotary phone.