On Rethinking Organizational Document Genres for Electronic Document Management

Document management has to be rethinked and clarified in organizations, especially for the coordinated adoption of organization-wide electronic document management systems (EDMSs). This paper reports the identification and evaluation of 11 organizational document genres of an industrial organization by using a framework constituted in an earlier study. The analysis revealed that different features need to be developed for different document genres. The results indicate that universal definitions for a "document" should not be used to envision organizational EDMSs. Rather, organizational document genres and genre systems should be systematically rethinked in collaboration with information systems specialists, organization designers and domain experts.