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What is Document Management?

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Overview

Document management plays a critical role in organizations, ensuring information is effectively captured, indexed, organized, stored, and accessed to support business objectives.

A foundational component of enterprise success, document management solutions empower businesses to harness the full value of data, stay compliant, improve security, and drive efficiency—across teams, departments, lines of business, and the entire organization.

A survey by Foundry Research revealed organizations continue to face challenges tied to how information is managed, with the top three obstacles impacting employee engagement and productivity as follows:

  1. Finding solutions that integrate with existing technology and systems.
  2. Complex processes and workflows.
  3. Difficulty accessing available knowledge.

Enterprises that invest in robust document management systems remove digital friction, creating an environment to connect, share, and govern content across the enterprise. As a result, these organizations gain a competitive and productivity edge, delivering content in context and secure information management at scale.

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Document management

Why is document management important?

According to a Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study, successful document management programs balance information workers’ productivity requirements with internal stakeholders’ need to automate routine activities and govern digital documents to meet legal or regulatory requirements. And, when done well, the results are impressive—creating a positive impact on capital and operational costs, employee and customer experience, and data integrity.

However, many organizations continue to rely on a variety of business tools and applications spread across disparate platforms, making it difficult to efficiently locate information, particularly within unstructured content. By integrating document management solutions with leading business applications—such as SAP®, Salesforce®, Microsoft®, Guidewire, and Google Workspace—organizations can build bridges between key applications and ensure knowledge workers have all the information they need to make critical business decisions, no matter their preferred interface.

Effective document management solutions are critical as they enable organizations to:

  • Eliminate integration issues across sprawling tech stacks.
  • Scale content services to unique use cases.
  • Enhance how employees find, engage with, and share information.
  • Facilitate anywhere collaboration among employees, teams, and external stakeholders.
  • Ensure information governance, data privacy, and compliance.
  • Boost agility to quickly respond to changing business needs.

How do businesses benefit from a document management solution?

A well-implemented document management solution offers several advantages to organizations, including the ability to:

  • Evolve digital transformation: Tap into the latest advancements in AI, cloud computing, and knowledge management to spur continued innovation and growth.
  • Increase productivity: Reduce time spent looking for documents with a trusted single source of truth across the entire organization.
  • Enable data-driven decision-making: Put accurate, real-time data at users’ fingertips for informed business decisions.
  • Apply AI to daily work: Use generative AI to easily uncover relevant insights, trends, and analytics.
  • Improve operational efficiency: Leverage workflow and process automation to reduce redundancy and manual steps.
  • Facilitate knowledge sharing: Promote seamless information exchanges with up-to-date documentation, seamless collaboration, and tight version control.
  • Improve compliance and risk management: Adhere to legal and industry regulations by automatically implementing strict access controls, records management, and data security policies.
  • Reduce operational costs: Consolidate information management systems and processes to streamline IT infrastructure and decrease technical administration and oversight.

How does GenAI enhance document management platforms?

With AI-powered conversational search and generative AI available directly within a document management platform, organizations can take their document management solutions and productivity to the next level. An intuitive AI content assistant helps users more easily identify, create, translate, and summarize content—unlocking new ways to understand and use information with natural language questioning. Moving beyond a content assistant, dynamic AI agents will act on behalf of knowledge workers, performing complex tasks across systems and tools to accelerate processes.

What are some core capabilities to look for in a document management solution?

The Forrester Total Economic Impact study went on to find that organizations looking for a document management solution were focused on five primary requirements for their vendor of choice:

  1. Mission-critical integrations with lead applications, such as ERP and productivity tools.
  2. Geographical presence and local expertise of complex compliance requirements.
  3. Out-of-the-box automations for productivity and embedded security and information governance.
  4. Expertise with data security accuracy, disaster recovery, and backup.
  5. A secure, compliant, and consistently available centralized workspace for organization-wide utilization.

When evaluating document management solutions, there are additional capabilities to consider. To get the most value out of your information and existing business tools, a solution should have:

  • Simple, intuitive, and easy-to-use interface navigation to boost adoption.
  • End-to-end content management with support for content capture, document generation, sharing and collaboration, enterprise application integration, and workflow automation.
  • AI-readiness features such as built-in metadata tagging, indexing, and categorization to organize content for improved GenAI results.
  • Automated, behind-the-scenes governance to protect and secure information throughout the lifecycle.
  • Platform and deployment flexibility with options to deploy on premises, hybrid, or in the cloud.

How do different departments and industries use document management solutions?

Document management solutions support a wide variety of use cases across departments and industries, each with unique requirements for storing, accessing, and securing information. By centralizing content and embedding it into core business applications, organizations enable knowledge workers to reduce digital friction and make better decisions.

Here’s how different teams and sectors benefit:

  • Sales: Streamline proposal creation, automate contract approvals, and access the latest collateral directly from CRM platforms to improve sales cycles and customer responsiveness.
  • Human resources (HR): Securely manage employee records, onboarding materials, and performance documents while ensuring compliance with labor regulations and data privacy requirements.
  • Customer service: Provide agents with fast access to up-to-date knowledge bases, service records, and customer communication histories to improve resolution times and customer satisfaction.
  • Legal: Centralize legal documents, case files, and compliance materials with version control, e-signature support, and audit trails to maintain legal integrity and readiness.
  • Engineering: Manage large volumes of technical drawings, product documentation, and change records while supporting collaboration across global teams and maintaining version accuracy.
  • Life sciences: Maintain regulatory-compliant documentation across research, clinical trials, and manufacturing, ensuring accuracy, traceability, and audit readiness in alignment with industry standards.
  • Government: Enable secure, compliant management of citizen records, permits, and regulatory documents while supporting transparency, auditability, and public service efficiency.

How can OpenText help with document management?

Explore how OpenText market-leading document management solutions can transform your business:

OpenText™ Content Management
Securely govern the information lifecycle by linking knowledge to processes with enterprise content management tools.

OpenText™ Core Content Management
Boost productivity and user adoption with intelligent cloud content management that seamlessly integrates into your crucial business applications.

OpenText™ Documentum™ Content Management
Ignite high-volume content and reduce digital friction with scalable document management software.

Related products

OpenText™ Content Management

Enterprise document management solution

Brings content and processes together to provide information access when and where needed.

OpenText™ Core Content Management

SaaS document management platform with an AI assistant

An intelligent cloud content management solution that seamlessly integrates with leading applications.

OpenText™ Documentum Content Management

Scalable document management software

A cloud-native enterprise content platform to meet high-volume content demands.

How can we help?

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