Thanks to regulatory developments which have made the mismanagement of documents an executive responsibility, the drive for compliance has made enterprise content management (ECM) a boardroom issue.
That`s the view of Joe Rios, Content Management Consultant at Bateleur Software Solutions. "Several high-profile cases have been reported recently of significant penalties being imposed due to lost documents. Formal business documents now have to be managed effectively from production to destruction," he says.
Implementing an ECM solution compels an organisation to address its content management practices, thereby reducing the risk of non-compliance. However, Rios stresses this is not the only reason to implement such a solution: it should be adopted for competitive advantage in terms of faster document retrieval and streamlined business processes.
In fact, ECM delivers several benefits to the top and bottom line. Many organisations, particularly in the financial sector, have realised the benefits of capturing and managing documents electronically. These include reducing paper usage and improving customer self-service possibilities such as electronic bill presentment and online cheque image availability.
An additional compliance issue is that legislation such as the Electronic Communications and Transactions (ECT) Act recognises electronic communication as legal and binding, and requires that it be retained in its original format. This extends to e-mail and even SMS communication, creating new challenges in terms of efficient content storage.
Legislation such as the Financial Intelligence Centre Act (FICA), requiring financial sector companies to acquire and retain multiple customer identification to reduce money laundering, increases the documentation burden.
Furthermore, millions of Web pages are now available and edited daily. The ECM discipline of Web content management enables Web site content to be managed by the users themselves, with minimal technical skills.
According to Rios, growing volumes of information are making content management increasingly indispensable. This is endorsed by a University of California study which estimates an annual growth of stored data of 30%. "More users are producing more output, while content needs to be found faster than ever before," he says.
In 2001, CIO surveys indicated that only about 20% planned to implement management systems. By 2004, this figure has risen to 60% planning to implement ECM over the next two years.
"While organisations have their structured information effectively managed in their enterprise databases, the unstructured information or content that makes up 80% of corporate data is only now being recognised as the valuable digital asset that it is," Rios points out.
"Vendors such as Mobius have sustained their leadership in the ECM market through their vision of the market drivers. Currently the market is estimated at $1 billion annually for document management alone, with broader content management valued at $2 billion annually. These figures are expected to grow exponentially as the above factors raise the priority of content management on the corporate agenda."
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