Improving Enterprise Document Management by a Quality System: A Case Study

Much of the collective knowledge of organisations is scattered in different types of document archives and in incompatible electronic documents within unintegrated applications. Along with technological challenges, organisational challenges caused by increasingly ubiquitous information technologies in everyday working need to be taken into account in the design of enterprise document management (EDM). The paper describes a case study in starting and organising continuous EDM improvement. The project took place in a power plant where an ISO 9002 quality system had previously been implemented. In the project, continuous EDM improvement was organised as an extension of the quality system. The paper describes document management in the plant before the project, the phases of the project, and analyses its results. The study shows that the adoption of the new EDM technologies required the organisation to rethink its documents, document management systems, work processes and the roles of human actors. The methods earlier adopted in the quality system for process improvement, however, offered a good basis both for performing the necessary reengineering tasks and organising continuous