Intranet document management systems as knowledge ecologies

Document management inside an organization is an interesting socio-technical problem. This paper considers Intranet Document Management as a knowledge ecology and presents a document lifecycle model consisting of five phases: creation, publication, organization, access, and destruction. Specific attention is paid to the knowledge ecology issues faced by document management systems (DMS), such as identifying typical heterogeneous work groups in an enterprise document management system, the implications of inter-user and inter-group, coordination (via, for example, annotation) and the consequences of DMS use over time. We conclude with a discussion of how the basic stages of a document lifecycle can tie together with the socio-technical goal of a scalable DMS to support a lively and dynamic document knowledge ecology.