The driving forces behind Electronic Document
Management Systems are market needs and compliance needs.
Market needs arise from the realities of a global
marketplace of the 90's in which competition is intense, customer loyalty hard to gain and
keep and business environment changes frequently. Organizations need to stay lean and
flexible to be able to capitalize on quick changing trends and gain customer mindshare.
Reducing cycle times of internal business processes is critical to achieving this goal.
Compliance with complex government regulations,
keeping with a litigious society and meeting industry standards such as ISO9000 mean
diligent and meticulous record keeping is mandatory.
The efficiency of an organization varies proportionately with
information velocity and inversely with information volume, information granularity
(details), and the depth of management hierarchy. In modern businesses the former has
slowed considerably in part due to an increase in the latter.
EDMS help in two ways. First electronic document filing and
retrieval helps to speed up information velocity and secondly it helps flatten management
hierarchy. An increase in information velocity helps businesses to bring products to
market faster and the flexibility afforded by a flattened hierarchy means it can respond
to market and other demands quickly.
