Transformation of documentation support in the digital economy: the historical aspect

Traditional document management methods are giving way to electronic systems integrated with business processes, as the conditions of digitalization inevitably introduce drastic changes in approaches to information management. The purpose of the article is to analyze current trends and challenges in the era of global digitalization, identify promising areas of development and identify progressive models of transformation of documentation support to improve the efficiency of document management in organizations. The relevance of the work is due to the need to adapt traditional office management systems to the requirements of automation, end-to-end data management and ensuring the legal significance of electronic document management. The research objectives include: reconstructing the current state of documentation support as a historically constituted institution entering a new phase of transformation on the path toward digital platforms; uncovering the inner logic of the transition from paper-based and hybrid document flow to a fully digital model built on unified repositories and API integrations — a transition comparable, in the scale of its institutional consequences, to earlier stages in the unification of Russian record-keeping; assessing the impact of digital technologies on the reliability and speed of document processing, as well as determining the specifics of digital transformation's impact on the processes of value appraisal, storage, and use of archival documents and other materials generated within electronic document flow systems. The research uses methods of theoretical analysis, synthesis, search, selection, systematization of sources, and comparison of research results from leading Russian companies. The methods of content analysis and case study were used to systematize the data. A problematic research field on the problems and prospects of transformation of documentation support for business process management in the digital economy is analyzed. A particular place in the article is occupied by the historical dimension of document flow: its digital transformation is treated not as an isolated technical and managerial phenomenon, but as another — and by no means final — link in the centuries-long chain of transformations of Russian document flow, from the prikaznoe record-keeping of the Muscovite state and the kollezhskoe system codified by the General Regulations of 1720, to the unified state record-keeping systems of the Soviet period (the Unified State Records System of 1973, the State System of Documentation Support for Management of 1988). Such a historical-genetic perspective allows the digitalization of document flow to be seen not as a break with tradition, but as its logical continuation.