Functions of EDMS and Security Requirements
After the implementation of the Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) at Hollywood organic co-op, it is now time to determine how to move the electronic documents from one point to another and the security measures to put in place. As indicated before, an EDMS is a central system in an organization, and that is why it should be secure and operated most efficiently and productively to enhance its benefits in the organization (Fernando et al., 2019). Since the system contains some of the vital documents of an organization, the access should be controlled to prevent authorized access, which might cause harm to the organization.
The security of a document should be put in mind from the first stage of the document life cycle to the last step. The benefits of having controlled access to the document through its entire life cycle are to prevent tampering with the details it contains and preventing unauthorized people from accessing it, for example, the business competitors (Fernando et al., 2019). The life cycle of the document starts with the creation phase, the capturing phase, the review phase, the adoption or rejection step, and finally, the sharing of the document once the stakeholders have approved it.
In the first phase of the creation of the document, the security access should be accessed by the team or the individual who is creating the document and only the topmost authority of the Co-op (Avsentiev et al., 2018). the second phase, which is the capture stage where all the analog data collected are transformed into digital files; the same two groups of people in step one should only have access to the document. After the document is captured, then it is essential to share it with stakeholders for review. In the review stage, the document should be shared in a format that cannot be tampered or changed to prevent the stakeholders from editing the document. At the review, stage access should be given only to people inside the organization. At the final stage, after the document is approved, access to the document should be given to all stakeholders, but it should be in a format that cannot be edited by other parties.
At the creation stage, the data is in the format of an analog document in most cases written on paper. In this stage, the document can be moved to other parties involved in this stage for contribution in the form of printed filed documents in paper form. The second stage of review, since the many parties are involved, and the document should not be edited it should be moved in the form of a printed document with space left to comment on the suggestion and opinion on the document (Jajuga et al., 2012). After the review and the document are approved, it should be formulated into a digital electronic document that is moved through the EDMS and can be accessed by the stakeholder. In the EDMS and the document lifecycle, only the administrator should have the authority to edit the document.
The security of the system is vital at all stages of the EDMS to ensure the safety of the document stored in the system. In the first step, there should be a user-level security protocol. In this stage, only authorized users who have authorized access credentials can access the system (Goldstein & Richards, 2019). The second step is document-level security, where only specific documents can be accessed by certain groups of people in the organization, for example, the management or accountants but not every user. Then thirdly is the folder level security, which can only be accessed by specific people in the organization. Finally, there should be an overall security control of the whole system to prevent external access to the network through firewalls. The physical security of the physical database center should be in a secure place where also access is restricted to the IT professionals only.
References
Avsentiev, O. S., Drovnikova, I. G., Zastrozhnov, I. I., Popov, A. D., & Rogozin, E. A. (2018). Methodology techniques protection control of information resource of electronic document management system. Trudy SPIIRAN, 57, 188-210.
Fernando, H., Hewavitharana, T., & Perera, A. (2019). Evaluation of Electronic Document Management (EDM) systems for construction organizations. In 2019 Moratuwa Engineering Research Conference (MERCon) (pp. 273-278). IEEE.
Goldstein, E. A., & Richards, A. V. (2019). U.S. Patent No. 10,185,557. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
Jajuga, K., Sokolowski, A., & Bock, H. H. (Eds.). (2012). Classification, clustering, and data analysis: recent advances and applications. Springer Science & Business Media.