| Consider that 80 percent of the information within most organizations is unstructured: word processing files, e-mail, spreadsheets, Web content, images, graphics, and all the other digital assets that organizations create and use as part of their business processes. Fully 90 percent of this unstructured information remains unmanaged within most organizations— and industry estimates are that this unmanaged information is growing at a rate of 36 percent per year.
But the picture gets even more complicated. Globalization has led organizations to become more distributed than they were in the past—a trend that will only increase over time. Cross-continent, cross-culture, multilanguage, hyper-collaboration environments will soon be the norm for most organizations within the next few years, if it is not already.
Furthermore, the business environment is subject to increasing regulation— not to mention it’s also become highly litigious. In the U.S., post-Enron regulatory changes have mandated that organizations regard information management as an essential part of running their business.
Whether you consider it from a compliance and litigation viewpoint, through a cost-cutting lens, or from a productivity enhancement perspective, enterprise content management (ECM) technology is an integral component of the IT infrastructure within an organization. But historically, the implementation of such an infrastructure, the development of content-related policies, and the adoption patterns for ECM have tended to be very fragmented. The result has been information silos and poor interoperability of information. |
