A highly debated topic during enterprise content management initiatives is how to establish a document-numbering standard. Discussions revolve around the format of the number in a document, the intelligence the number should hold, and its adoption and standardization across the organization. In the digital age, however, much of the reasoning around the conventional smart numbering techniques are reminiscent of the physical paper era. Therefore, perhaps it is time for organizations to rethink document numbering.
Organizations that deal with paper have a strong need to put intelligence in a number. The intelligence represents the type of document, the organizational discipline, whether the document was meant for internal or external consumption, and so on. However, digitalization has rendered this method of numbering documents archaic.
Today, content is stored in digital repositories and classified using metadata tags such as location, discipline and document type. As a result, numbering schema is rendered irrelevant, as the details that describe a document are inherent as tags associated with the document. Furthermore, digital age content tagging capabilities enable an accurate and effective taxonomy. Consequently, digital content can be easily searched using the tags assigned to them. In addition, tags offer a far more complete description of the underlying content as opposed to a number.
However, if a formal document number having metadata is still required, the number can be created dynamically using the inherent tags associated with the document. Apart from simplifying the process, there is another significant benefit of this approach. It is possible to isolate the impact of organizational changes on the numbering scheme in the future.
Given that the content is currently electronically categorized, there is no need to assign a number to capture some of the metadata values as part of its numbering schema. Hence, it is time to embrace the benefits of a digital content repository where content is searchable by how it is tagged and not via an intelligent document number.
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