Dissecting a typical "corporate" document
I have such "corporate" documents pass through my computer pretty much every day; let's dissect one of them.

I have no doubt that it was churned out from some sort of turgid template, one that had been around for some time, or had been copied from some earlier document. I noted that the document properties showed such things like the fact that it was last printed nine months before it was written, and that it was written by someone working for a different company than the guy who purported to have written it.

Page 1 was a front page. No value delivery, other than telling me who wrote it and when. It also had an Authorisations box on it that I suspect means nothing to anybody, ever. Wasn't filled in. Page 2 was an automatically generated Table of Contents. Can't click on it to go anywhere, so that's more useless screen space, continued on to Page 3.

Page 4 contained a Document History table, and a Distribution List table followed by this wonderful paragraph:

The master for this document is held electronically and only signed copies are valid. An unsigned, printed document is not copy controlled and is to be used for INFORMATION ONLY, as it will not be automatically updated. It is therefore the responsibility of the reader to ascertain that it is a currently valid copy.

We've all seen this sort of stuff before, but have you ever stopped to consider what it means? I wonder how a signed copy means anything? As it will be on paper, how will a signed copy get automatically updated? If the only valid copy is the electronic one, then why all the useless crap between pages 1 and 5? And what about electronic copies?

Page 5 continued this mumbo-jumbo. And on Page 6, the document actually started. The document goes on to page 21, and contains 2,800 words. As a comparison, by the time you've got here, you've read about 1,300 words in this article.

Why do companies write documents like this? I think it has to be because they can't get out of the paper mindset, and worse, allow that to be reinforced by using tools like Word. That document was intended to be shared among a group of people. It was actually a reference document for a set of servers that are a test-rig for the project I'm working on, and will be updated reasonably frequently, and referred to often.

Notwithstanding the statement on Page 4 that I highlighted above, this document has been developed as a paper document. But those who want to use it need to be able to get up-to-date content. They don't want to have to find a valid signed copy and then work out if it's current; they want to get at the master, quickly and simply. Which means that the content should be in an electronic retrieval system, indexed for easy location, and, most of all, formatted to be read on the screen.

Word doesn't do any of those things. What's missing is any thought about what the document is really for. Do the authors of such documents stop to think about who the document is really aimed at? Has any thought gone into what those people want from it, and is it presented in such a way that they can get it easily and clearly once they've found the document?