Link management in technical customer documentation An exploratory study

The technical customer documentation of a technical product plays an important role in international competition in industry. Customer documentation is more and more delivered, used and managed in electronic form. The main problems of technical customer document management in inter-organizational projects are related to unsystematic working procedures and heterogeneous information systems between different organizations. These often cause unnecessary overlapping and manual work, and make technical communication between different actors in the project inefficient. Internet technology and SGML-based XML language family provide means to develop technical customer document management in interorganizational industrial projects. The purpose of this exploratory study is to describe characteristics of an inter-organizational industrial project, characteristics and development potentials related to the technical customer documentation, and to identify problems related to link management for more precise investigation. A scenario for managing the technical customer documentation in extranet is introduced. The scenario indicates that link management in interand intra-organizational networks, such as extranets and intranets, will have crucial role in document management and that future research should focus on developing systematic methods for link creation, maintenance and