Every day, organizations create a huge volume of unstructured content that includes customer profiles, purchase orders, employee records, financial reports, forms, scanned invoices, contracts, quality documents, engineering drawings and e-mails, among others. The challenge of handling paper, digital content, records and documents is mounting. Studies have shown that unstructured content makes up 80% or more of all corporate information and is growing at an annual rate of anywhere from 65% to 200%, depending on the industry.
At most companies, digital and paper-based content often exist in a state of unmanaged chaos. This content is stored in multiple locations, such as local computer drives, file shares, file folders and file cabinets without a consistent taxonomy for identification. This makes it hard for users to find and reuse the content they need for their daily tasks.
The result is time wasted searching for and re-creating information. This also promotes less efficient practices, such as using e-mail as a document collaboration tool.
Organizations are adopting Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platforms to address business challenges associated with unmanaged information. Enterprise Content Management Solutions improve business productivity and agility by providing better access to information and creating a foundation for sharing, securing and reusing this content throughout the enterprise. An Enterprise Content Management platform allows companies to reduce data hardware and software costs while integrating key information in unique ways to exploit new opportunities or quickly adapt to new business requirements.
