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I am helping a client develop a system that will document their policies,
procedures, and working instructions. Eventually this documentation will be
used to gain ISO9000 certification. An unwritten requirement of ISO9000,
according to a recent article in Intercom by Ralph E. Robinson and Robert
Lessman, is that the documentation must be able to change as quickly as the
organization changes. This highlights a problem I have been tussling with in
developing the information plan for my project.
Designing a suitable fast-reacting documentation system requires not only
timely response to change information from process owners, but also quick
and comprehensive notification of those changes to relevant interested
parties. I want to create a dynamic system that does not need to list the
names or titles of interested parties in the changed document itself. I
would like to develop a system that automatically lists all documents that
point to the changed document, using that as a dynamic indicator of
interest. The owners of the process documents pointing to the changed
document would then be notified of the change.
Normally, we drill down for information: we reference a source from a
referring document, then go to that source. Suppose I wanted to do it
backwards, how would you go about listing all references that point to a
source, from the source itself?
