  Reprinted from the October 17, 2005, edition of OutputLinks
Fitting Your CEO for an Ankle Bracelet Surprisingly, most companies still don’t have a formal plan in place to manage the lifecycle of documents. As a result, those millions of pages you’re printing and the countless email messages your company sends and receives daily are lying in wait to organize themselves, like the Terminator T-1000’s liquid metal, into an effective machine that can get your company into the wrong headlines—and your officers into bad trouble. As specialists in the creation of high-value documents, we must become aware of our roles and responsibilities in the lifecycle of a document and what we must do to help protect our enterprises (and our bosses).
An active document, such as an open insurance claim, a loan application, or a purchase order request, is still in flux, being routed around a company for action and approval. When a loan is approved and processed, that application moves from the active stage to the static stage. Customer statements are active until they are mailed, perhaps only hours later, then they move to the static stage, too. Later, according to the rules dictated by your company’s records retention policies, static documents are purged, wiped clean, destroyed permanently. Less than ten percent of a company’s documents are in the active stage; in an insurance company, where there are millions of closed claims, the percentage can be as low as one percent. Static content, including e-mail messages, by definition never changes. As we have seen in the news, though, that definition must be enforced so that a company can prove that static content cannot be and has not been altered. Finally, a company is required to be able to find a needle in a haystack quickly, producing archived information upon demand, and demonstrating that the retrieved information is complete. Failure to produce information in a timely fashion has recently cost one company millions of dollars in fines. Readers of OutputLinks are high volume transaction output (HVTO) professionals, identifying with the technology challenges of producing lots of highly personalized, valuable documents on a regular basis. Traditionally, too, software vendors serving this market have had their hands full with the arcana of feeding big-iron printers, from the inverse-landscape text orientation and CMEs’ to the emerging AFP color space. Considerations of records retention and archive management have been the specialty of members of another professional organization: ARMA, the American Records Management Association. HVTO professionals, armed with budgets to buy millions of dollars of sleek printers and output processing equipment and the software and computer systems that drive them, haven’t always been aware of their less flamboyant sisters and brothers in records management. Indeed, until the arrogant and careless actions of a few corporations started hitting the evening news a few years ago, some people had the impression that records retention was a matter of executive convenience—meaning “get rid of the inconvenient records.” These days, records managers are in the board rooms, and their role is regarded as critical to the company’s health—and their budgets are increasing proportionally. Those of us who are generating the documents that the records managers manage in the static stage have to figure out how to work closely with the archivists. Companies that are serious about protecting themselves have formed multi-departmental committees comprised of the company’s top lawyers, accountants, information technologists, output specialists, and records managers. Increasingly, HVTO professionals these days find themselves attending the annual ARMA convention, sometimes actually joining the organization, searching for ways to protect their company and simplifying the movement of documents from active to static to purged. OutputLinks readers—and the software vendors who serve them—need to wake up to this changed world. It’s not enough for a vendor to provide a newer-faster-better-cheaper composition system. It has to assist its customers in figuring out what to do with the 120 pages they’re helping to print every minute. And since an archival system should be monolithic, vendors in the HVTO space should be thinking about e-mail as a document, too. The technology of static-stage document management is as complex as that of the active stage; it needs to be studied and mastered by all of us here. We need to get in the habit of asking new questions of our suppliers, such as asking what help can they provide in solving the problems raised by the lifecycle of a document. We need to become familiar and, over time, expert in topics such as archive database formats, speed of document ingestion, scalability, size of hardware/software footprint, up-front and hidden costs, retrieval speed and flexibility, encryption choices, archive support for printstreams of all types, ability to connect to active-document-stage systems such as composition programs or workflow management systems—and many more. Some observers of the world of high-value document production predict that the era of specialization is over—you’ll soon drive your centralized printers just like your inkjet printers. These observers do not take into account the irreplaceable contribution of HVTO specialists to the committees that are working to keep their CEOs free of pesky ankle bracelets. The challenges of generating and managing documents—of all types—in nearly all organizations is today bigger than ever before, and there’s more at stake today than ever, too.
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We all understand but rarely
consider the lifecycle of a document, which has three stages: