There appears to be confusion between the term “document control ” and the commonly used term “document management”. In fact, in many occasions it appears that document management has become the generic idiom for anything that involves the handling of documents whether they are of a temporary nature or are central to an organisation’s operations.

We intend to describe below the two distinct disciplines and hopefully clear up this area of confusion.

Document Management as a broad term means a system where documents can be safely stored, indexed and searched, viewable, version controlled, archived or deleted. Document Management can also create an environment where many users can or work simultaneously on the creation and editing of documents and, at the front end, to scan paper documents and convert them into an electronic format for easier management.

Document Management systems have grown enormously in complexity over the years. Initially, they involved the scanning and storage of documents in microfiche format with indexing for easy retrieval, to their current position of generic status where they cover the electronic management of any type of information with the blurring of the lines between itself, Content Management (web pages) and Knowledge Management (unstructured data).     

In its position as a generic term it could be said that document management involves the management of a large amount of documents that are primarily of a short lived nature. These can include emails, electronic documents and scanned letters; all of which will mainly have a single version existence.

Document Control on the other hand is more narrow in nature and involves the management (or control) of documents that are more essential to an organisation’s operations.

They are documents that have been put together for a precise use in mind, released for explicit reasons and have gone through a recorded approval process to ensure relevance and correctness. When the documents need to be modified to reflect changes in operations, the required changes and their reasons are documented, the person making the changes and the date of those changes are recorded and, importantly, the modified versions are separated from former versions to ensure accuracy.

It is important that access to the documents is restricted so that only the latest version of the suitable documents are available to the people who require them. In addition, prior versions must be archived for historical purposes.

A recorded history trail of the events in the life of a document and its prior versions is a useful tool in being able to quickly access information about a document and should be included as a standard in a Document Control system.

Clearly these documents have many lives to reflect the normal changes that occur in an organisation and its operations with each life representing a change however slight from the previous one. The prior lives of the document, or versions, need to be accessible so that not only the development of the document can be followed but also so that a prior version if appropriate can either be reinstated as the current latest version or be used as the template to build the latest version.

Given the similarity of both disciplines and the resemblance of the terminologies it is easy to understand why misunderstanding has rained and why the term document management is used as the generic term for the electronic handling of documents. But as a rule of thumb it is fair to say that a Document Control system could do the role of Document Management in an environment where the amount of short-lived documents is not too great; while care has to be taken to ensure that a Document Management system has the prescriptive elements in place, or able to be activated, to effectively act as a Document Control system.