USING THE CARD CATALOG

USING THE CARD CATALOG

By W H Inmon

You wake one day up in your corporation and you have a tidal wave of documents – some old, some new – scattered all over the office. These documents have been in collection for years.  You have contracts. Financial reports. Plans. Accounts payable. Accounts receivable. Email. It just never ends. And when you wake up, you find that you need to find a document fast. But the documents are scattered everywhere and are hard to find.

In order to alleviate your pain and frustration, what you need is a card catalog for your documents, just like the library has with its card catalog of the many books in the library. You don’t spend huge amounts of time in the library looking for a book. So why should you spend inordinate amounts of time in your office looking for a document?

What you need is your own document card catalog. For your office. For your documents.

What would life look like if you had one of these card catalogs for the documents in your office? What could the document card catalog save you?

There are (at least!) two kinds of savings to be made. Those savings are –

1)      Expediting the physical search for the document

2)      Looking into the contents of the document.

Let’s examine these two types of savings.

Physical search – certainly being able to lay your hands on a document saves a lot of time and frustration. No question about it. But there is a problem. What if someone has gone before you and has taken the document from its location and now the document is somewhere else. And the person did not know that they were supposed to inform the system of this change. Now the document is not where the system says it was and you have to go back to square one. Bummer.

Unfortunately, this scenario is not far fetched at all.

However, being able to search for the physical location of a document is still a great tactical capability.

Content search – being able to look inside a document and reference its contents is a strategically valuable thing to do. You can look for names. Addresses. Account numbers. Date and time, and for anything else that you deem to be important.

Furthermore, you can look across multiple documents and compare notes. In doing so you can quickly gather all documents that are related.

Take time for example. You can look for all documents that were generated from July to August.

Or take an oil well. You can find all documents that relate to any activity against an oil well.

Or a person. You can quickly find all documents that mention a person or persons.

In short, being able to look inside the contents of a document and find all documents that are related is a tremendously powerful capability. It is a strategic capability.

So the payback for looking at documents has both a tactical and a strategic component. And there is an important payback for both of these capabilities.

If you would like more information about building your own corporate document card catalog, take a look at Datavox.ai. Datavox.ai knows all about corporate document card catalogs.

Bill Inmon lives in Denver with his wife and his two Scotty dogs – Jeb and Lena. Jeb is soon to have his 13th birthday. Lena is only 5. Jeb likes to sleep all day and Lena is full of fire and life. She wants to play with Jeb all the time and Jeb likes to sack out. Until it is dinner time. Then Jeb gets to be really animated.