Unstructured Content Continues to Plague Enterprises: Report

One year ago MSDynamicsWorld published an article on the high number of documents that are lost at the typical organization and the value that enterprise content management (ECM) systems bring to the table in stemming that flow. "Unstructured content" permeates across all enterprises and can be found in nearly every corner of an organization.

Seemingly innocuous, the vast collection of documents, records, presentations, contracts, web pages, XML components, audio, video, scanned images, engineering drawings, and enterprise reports that companies wrestle with daily is both expensive and time consuming.

The Problem Persists

One year later, and despite the continual advancements in business technology, organizations aren't in any better position to harness their unstructured content than they were 12 months ago. In fact, Robert Nelson, a long-time Enterprise Content Management (ECM) expert and a practice director for Dayton, Oh.-based Crown Partners, says the problem continues to exacerbate.

Nelson points to a recent EDM Group report as proof. The organization found that the UK workforce alone wastes about 37.6 million hours a week (or, roughly 1-1/2 hours per person, per week) looking for lost documents and information that's been misplaced or lost at work. The wasted time translates into about $557 million British pounds lost every week (roughly $895 million U.S. dollars).

EDM Group expects the problem to get worse because the amount of information and data employees receive is increasing at a dramatic rate. For example, the group says that about 56 percent of people claim they now receive more information at work than they did three years ago, and that 18 percent believe they have ...