Create workflows to create documents

Documents suck.  People don't want them
but they are a typical and critical part
of business oftentimes.  Let's change this.

The goal is not producing documents, its managing workflow.  One consequence of a process may be that it creates documents but in an efficient system, the goal is to manage knowledge and creating small, reusable components of things that you can use again, thus reducing cost and improving quality.

Documents are concrete artifacts that are typically a composition of several other smaller things.  For example, a document could include some background, a schedule, and some tables of data.  Web based content management systems do a good job of separating content from presentation but today's document-based systems very infrequently do this.  For this reason there is a lot of waste in project work.  Documents get started, get re-purposed, and the knowledge base expands but not in an organized or analyzable way.  Things get really messy in project.

But it is possible for us to know our document types and figure out what kinds of things we have to produce for our customers.  Once we do this we can figure out the elemental parts of these documents and have those parts created through efficient workflows.  Just like the web publishes pages our consulting companies should be publishing documents that are compiled automatically through our data, systems, and knowledge.  Writing net-new things is required to extend the existing database but this is a good thing.

So knowledge workers of the world, please think of how you can shorten the overall workflow of your document-creation streams and look to partner with an organization like mine who can take your project data and present it to your customers in a low-cost and very-high-impact way.