How electronic document management is taught in a technical university

I want to talk about the seven-year experience in conducting the Enterprise content management (ECM) course at the St. Petersburg Electrotechnical University.

Subject: EDMS and ECM

Recent years have been marked by a very intensive development of the ECM market. Many state and commercial organizations are switching to electronic document management and electronic storage of documents. In this regard, there is an increasing need for specialists with relevant knowledge and skills in the field of ECM.
Engineers and programmers should be able to provide the technical side of the issue. Document managers must know the specifics of electronic document management. Financiers and economists need to know the intricacies of working with electronic financial documents. The transition to electronic document management entails changes in legal practice - therefore, there is a need to give relevant knowledge to future lawyers.
The tasks of teaching an ECM course at a university can be formulated as follows: firstly, it is the formation of students' ideas about the theoretical and methodological foundations of information management, and secondly, the study of the specifics of using modern tools and methods of information management in specific subject areas.

When preparing the course, the teacher inevitably raises the question: where to get the materials? The educational literature on ECM in Russian is practically absent. The materials available on the Internet, as a rule, are “tailored” for very specific products of specific companies and are poorly suited to study at a university. Therefore, without resorting to foreign sources can not do. From foreign websites, you can pay particular attention to the following:

www.aiim.org- The site of the association for information processing and image management systems (in English);
www.piaf-archives.org/espace-formation/course/view.php?id=9 - course of lectures on modern archival affairs (in French),:;
www.arma.org - website of the American Records Management Association (in English);
dlmforum.eu/index.php - website of the European Organization for the life cycle of documents (in English);
archivesonline.wordpress.com is a blog on the use of digital technology in archiving (in French).
fileformats.wordpress.com is a digital storage blog.

Carnival participants

Student : I would go to Sadovtsi. Let me be taught. Where and who teaches this?
Lecturer and department : We want to teach electronic document management at our own institute. Where to go, who will help prepare the training course, which software to choose?
Software developer : What are we ready to give universities? What benefit do we get from this?

Our implementation experience : with the support of the department, find an IT partner, or rather a few.

- your suitcase?
- This one without a pen? My!

Someone inherited apartments and cars, and I got "Electronic document management and payments." 2004, the head of the department with his team of teachers leaves the department, urgently remaining “teachers” are given out to the teachers remaining in the department. By that time, in our company, we had already developed and implemented for our customers the electronic archive system ALEEE Archive (later renamed STOR-M ). But to develop and implement information systems does not mean being ready to teach them to students.

How was gold washed

Even today on the Russian Internet there is little academic information on the subject, one continuous advertisement. Foreign resources are certainly richer, but translating and localizing to the needs of the university is a colossal job that requires a lot of time, special skills and motivation. In search of something ready, they turned to the two companies EOS and DocsVision, but at that time nothing was offered to us except licenses. There were no ready-made academic courses or related business courses. Then we turned to Documentum Services Russia, now EMC Documentum .

A meeting was held with managers responsible for affiliate activity and the learning process. Their main doubt was the phrase: "We will wean you, as well as several university teachers before, and after a while you will disappear in the fog." The decisive argument was that our main business lies in the field of electronic document management and we have serious incentives not to curtail the project. Consent has been obtained.

In January 2007 I was studying at the “Documentum Technical Basics” course, 40 hours, the teacher Konstantin Bazhukhov passed the final exam test along with all the students (sysadmins and implementers), I had to sweat, but I honestly received the minimum passing score, which remained extremely satisfied. In November 2008, the course "Fundamentals of ECM" + "Implementation of ECM solutions", 40 hours, teacherAlbert Bertyakov . The course has much in common with a similar AIIM, it was localized and significantly supplemented by Albert analytics and Russian practice.

What happened

The program received from Documentuma was adapted for senior students of specialty 0719 "Information systems in engineering and technology." Theory "ECM Fundamentals" + "Implementation of ECM Solutions" + "Documentum Technical Basics" + "STOR-M Electronic Archive System" + laboratory work, total course volume - 160 hours. With the transition to two-level training, the course is divided into two: for undergraduate and graduate programs. Students gain knowledge and skills that can only be obtained outside the university for money. Our graduates are happy to take in companies implementing ECM, not only Documentum and STOR-M.

Conclusion

Thus, the success factors for this course were:
1. A good theory . Translated materials, vendor materials, market analytics, experience of implemented projects in our own company.
2. "Correct" software and a full-fledged workshop .
3. Related items . One apple tree is not a cherry orchard. For the full-fledged development of a specialist, we read: “Designing Information Systems”, “Collection of SRS Requirements”, “ITIL IT Infrastructure Management” and much more.
4. Further education of the teacher . There is not enough time to update materials independently; periodic courses and seminars help a lot.
5. Technical support. It is carried out by own system administrator.
6. The work of the teacher on the profile of the subject . I am the General Director of ALEE SOFTWER LLC ; we are introducing electronic archives and industrializing documents .
7. Marketing and PR of the taught course . I have repeatedly participated in joint seminars and conferences with EMC Documentum, the interest is huge both among colleagues and among students.

Ready to share information with all interested.

PS We invite university professors to a face-to-face meeting and discussion of the problems of teaching information technology at the EMC Academic Forum Russia , which will be held in St. Petersburg on November 21-22. Places like there are still.