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Organizations of every size and form have invested substantial capital and resources to implement specific systems for different divisions or departments to create and manage documents. This activity has historically been done for a number of reasons including:

• Different departments have different needs and are best served with different document, imaging, and email or content management systems.
• Some department specific applications (e.g. Case Management, Accounting, ERP) have integrated document management, records management or imaging functionality.
• Many organizations grow via acquisitions and the acquired companies often have different systems.

The effect has been the creation of different repositories, or silos of knowledge, for different business needs.

Prior to discussing what, if any, issues these silos of knowledge create, one must first better understand the types of repositories available. Most organizations do not even recognize the number of different repositories they have. For example:

• Physical records in one or more centralized or decentralized records centers.
• Boxes of physical records stored off-site in a warehouse.
• Emails stored in an email system.
• Emails stored in an archiving system.
• Electronic documents or emails stored on backup tapes.
• Documents in a document management, content management or collaboration system.
• Documents and images stored in accounting, human resources, enterprise resource management or other systems.
• Images, whether stored on a server or in an imaging system.

There are, in fact, two types of documents intermixed in these repositories:

1. Draft, transitory or non-business documents.
2. A Document of Record is any document that the organization needs to retain due to legal, regulatory, compliance or business reasons.

Even though the first type of document needs to be managed due to storage requirements, the second type is critical to the organization and is the basis for this white paper.

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