Sink Or Swim

InformationWeek Green - September 26, 2011

InformationWeek Green

Sink or Swim

The enterprise is awash in data. Information has never been easier to store, copy, and distribute, particularly semistructured and unstructured information such as documents, email, and PowerPoint slides. But as anyone who's trolled through an overstuffed inbox or rifled through nested folders for a crucial bit of content knows, there is such a thing as too much information.

Even more of a problem is that most companies don't seem to know what to do about it--and aren't even trying all that hard. According to our InformationWeek Content Management in the Enterprise Survey, 48% of respondents don't have a strategy for managing content, and another 16% don't know if they do.

Managing content basically means two things: saving the data the business needs for the appropriate amount of time, and getting rid of everything else. But our survey shows that organizations are capitulating to content chaos rather than managing it. For example, only 1 in 5 respondents makes a habit of deleting files at the end of their retention periods. Everyone else muddles through by either storing things forever or randomly deleting data. That's not a strategy--at least, it's not a good one.

The lack of a strategy can have repercussions beyond cluttered hard drives. For one, all this information eats up storage space, and simply throwing more disk at the problem won't scale. For another, reams of unordered content make it hard for business users and IT to meet regulatory and compliance requirements for specific kinds of data and lead to costly searches in the event of an e-discovery exercise.

Enter enterprise content management (ECM) software, which seeks to structure, order, and apply rules to inherently unstructured information. While originally designed for massive documentation projects like the manufacturing specifications for a Boeing 747, ECM can also be used to help companies bring order to the chaos of documents, emails, PowerPoint slides and other quotidian files that occupy the typical employee's workday.

However, ECM is more than just a product category. It's a set of information strategies, document taxonomies and business processes that must have significant buy-in from C-level managers to IT to the end users who create and consume data.

We'll examine the state of ECM in today's enterprise, drawing upon our survey of 425 technology professionals to understand the content management problems companies are facing, and suggest ways they can be solved. We'll also offer six recommendations for those who don't yet have an ECM strategy on how to bootstrap an effective ECM program that won't turn into another dead-end project.

To read the rest of the article,
Download the September InformationWeek supplement on ECM.
ECM Solving the Problem of Unstructured Data
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