The development of Microsoft Word as the dominant form of creating documents in the world is an interesting one. Taking the mantle from Wordperfect, the original word processors developed before the internet. Word processors offered many writing enhancing capabilities that had no alternative a the time (spell check, text movement, etc..).
Maintenance Costs
However, an undiscussed topic is how document creation programs impose very high maintenance and administration. Here are a list of the limitations of Word documents when compared to Wikis or Blogs:
Problems with Documents
- Word documents (and other document types like Excel, PowerPoint, etc..) can not be managed as a group of documents except by organization within files
- A Word document must generally be opened on a one to one basis in order to find specific passages
- Individual Word documents must be formatted on a one to one basis. Unlike a blog or wiki, a single style can not be applied across documents
- When it comes to querying large numbers of these documents for comparison and contrasting (such as checking project documentation) there is no way of effectively checking the inputs to forms that are similar across many documents (i.e. as entries in a spreadsheet can be checked). For Example, on large systems engagements duplicate copies of functional specifications are kept on a server in a Word document format. Specific fields could be queried if a blog or wiki were used, but with Word there is no way to run reports off of on field for say 20 similar documents. This greatly increases errors in the writing and comparing of the specifications. However, the information in this blog is stored in a MySQL database (this blog is written in WordPress) and is easily query-able. Computer software has generally excelled at quickly creating documents, however, it has not developed goods ways of managing these documents. (One of most promising file managers – ADCSee Pro – has only moderate interest in the market and is predominantly used for photo management.)
- The word processing philosophy is counter to collaborative writing. Wikipedia was not written in MS Word and could not have been. Wiki is based upon collaborate software allowing many thousands of people to collaborate, most of whom never meet in person. Collaboration is very important for many writing endeavors. As an example, consulting companies spend a great amount of time sending Word documents back and forth often times betweek people in different cities. They do this instead of using the far more efficient Wiki (with its collaborative authorship and editorial control) because they are not able to break from their document creation philosophy. As a result their collaboration effort is far higher than it needs to be. Secondly, after the proposal is complete, it is more difficult to find and leverage off of for future work.
This translates into a huge amount of wasted effort in managing documents in these individual containers. With the development of blogs and wikis, one has to wonder what the purpose of creating a Word document in the future will be. Companies that move way from Office documents (and port the information to collaborative web software) will have a huge advantage in the marketplace in terms of knowledge generation, maintenance and retrieval over those that continue to rely on the document paradigm. The technology is here for collaboration and archival. Its now a question of getting people to understand that creating individuals documents like Word documents as containers create information management issues and disable collaborative writing endeavors.
Powered by ScribeFire.
