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All of us know how critical information has become to an enterprises’ ability to compete and survive in a marketplace. However, this is not as simple as it sounds in today’s complex information-rich environment. Most of the information created today is digital and enterprises are continually facing the challenges arising from exponential information growth.
Digital Information, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information, is expected to grow approximately 50 per cent annually. Of all enterprise information, over 80 per cent of it is unstructured, 95 per cent of which is not managed. With tightened budget constraints, enterprises are facing the toughest challenge of storing and protecting all of this information. Most enterprises' unstructured information is increasing between 65 to 200 per cent a year, depending on the industry sector. Content – or unstructured information – includes electronic documents, engineering drawings, XML, still images, audio and video files, and many others.
It is not only about getting access to the information that people need; it is more about making sense of the information they have -- giving them the ability to focus, prioritize and apply their expertise, visualize and understand key data, and reduce the amount of time they spend dealing with the complexity of an information-rich environment. All the time people spend tracking down information, managing and organizing documents, and making sure their teams have the data they need, could be much better spent on analysis, collaboration, insight and other work that adds value.
There are reports, which show that employees can spend up to 40 per cent of a workday looking for content and untangling issues with versioning, ownership, and reformatting. As a result, too much expensive content goes underused or must be recreated. Additionally organizations in India are also beginning to feel the heat from various compliance guidelines as outlined in regulations such as the IT ACT, SEBI Listing Clause 49, Basel II, SOX act, etc. These regulations compel organizations to store and manage data for specific periods of time giving rise to content management challenges. The various data theft scandals in the BPO industry have also made the BPO organization carefully analyze their data storage and security strategies. European Union has recently given a final approval on to new rules requiring telecom companies to store phone and Internet data for up to two years to help fight terrorism and other serious crimes.
Hence, given the content management challenges, enterprises need to look at adopting well-defined and well-planned content management strategies in association with experts in the field. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) strategy, is about establishing a single, consistent infrastructure and building a unified architecture with a single repository for simplicity and lower cost, consistent GUIs for lower training costs, unified metadata and search for easier integration, aggregation and reuse of content, and consistent support for platforms and development languages for lower deployment and ownership costs. ECM provides the infrastructure that gets your content under control and helps you achieve the following 4C objectives.
Content ROI – Employees can spend up to 40 per cent of a workday looking for content and untangling issues with versioning, ownership, and reformatting. As a result, too much expensive content goes underused or must be recreated. ECM provides the infrastructure that gets your content under control.
Compliance – Virtually all organizations are now legally compelled to securely store and access various content for a defined period. With ECM you can set policies for retaining, storing, and retrieving specific content – and mitigate the enormous risk of noncompliance.
Collaboration – Content managed in departmental silos and restricted to certain geographies blocks the sharing of content by distributed teams. As a result, productivity drops and time to market slows. ECM enables people to create, capture, and distribute collaborative content on the tightest timeline.
Consolidation – An ECM using a single infrastructure rather than siloed content systems dramatically drops overall total costs and increases security. One ECM repository that can scale to over a billion objects offers a quick response time for transactional processes.
IT decision-makers need to work at a broad, common, yet comprehensive enterprise content management platform as an extension of their existing IT infrastructure.
The way enterprises work is going to change in the next few years, they need to adopt technologies such as ECM to survive in the ‘always on’ environment. In today’s knowledge economy, enterprises who understand that information is a critical asset and are being able to use it as a competitive differentiator will succeed and survive in tomorrow’s marketplace.
(The author is president, EMC, India & SAARC)
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