What is Document Management?

Document Management is the total set of planned and controlled activities to support the life-cycle of documents, from their creation to the time of destruction.

A document needs to be managed to make sure that it's content (know-how and experience) is timely available for anyone who requires access to this content.

Document management involves many people in the organisation. Their responsibilities are different, and are grouped towards roles of being the owner of the document, the custodian, the originator or the user.

Why do we need Document Management?

We manage information (in documents) because it enables the business to:

• Record completed activity to comply with regulatory, legal and corporate requirements and to protect BSP's commercial interests.
  
• Maintain assets so that they remain fit for purpose throughout their useful life.
  
• Provide a reliable basis of information to support future work.
  
• Build and operate BSP assets in a safe, efficient and environmentally responsible manner
  
• Improve productivity by:
  - leveraging BSP's information assets
  - avoiding "re-inventing the wheel"
  - providing easy and consistent access to information
  - Maintain access to information following changes in the BSP organization, including staff changes.
  - Protect and preserve BSP's intellectual property.
  -Identify opportunities to grow BSP's business.

As we have to manage information, and as the information in many cases is in documents, we as a consequence have to manage documents.

What is being done to improve document management?

• Raise document management awareness (document is an asset, worth properly managing).
  
• Define the ownership, and related responsibilities for all our documents.
  
• Based on document types, define how to maintain each document (including required quality checks).
  
• Improve information retrieval options everyone within BSP has.
  
• Provide document management tools to allow all employees of BSP to manage the documents they create themselves.