The management of unstructured data is one of the major unsolved problems in the IT industry, as up to 80% of all content in many organisations takes the form of unstructured content.
Hanns K"ohler-Kr"uner, principal consultant at HKK Consulting, speaking at the Document Capture and Process Executive Forum recently, said managing volumes of unstructured content is challenging.
The forum was hosted by Kofax in partnership with Intervate and ITWeb.
Organisations are looking to enterprise content management (ECM) to bring greater focus on these growing headaches and manage the content chaos, he pointed out.
“This includes strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organisational processes.”
He said growing employee frustrations with organising and finding information along with the overwhelming demands of information requests is raising the need for ECM.
Content mess
In his presentation, K"ohler-Kr"uner also referred to the findings of the latest AIIM report on the document capture market, released earlier this year.
According to the study, while organisations have made progress in reducing paper consumption, only four in 10 organisations reported that paper consumption is declining, he said, adding that over 30% of organisations, however, said paper consumption is still increasing.
K"ohler-Kr"uner explained that 66% of organisations that are scanning documents are doing so principally to a static archive - essentially a file cabinet replacement - and 50% are manually indexing the information in this electronic file cabinet.
“Only 16% of the organisations we surveyed are actually scanning to process. The number is larger among organisations with more than 1 000 employees, but still remarkably low,” he explained.
“This is all the more frustrating because as we have noted in previous studies, the ROI of capture increases as the technology is pushed from archives into processes,” he pointed out.
K"ohler-Kr"uner said 39% of the organisations report a ROI after 12 months or less; 60% report a ROI within 18 months. Among the various ECM technologies, users cite scanning more than any other technology as the top ROI generator.
The report also showed that only 24% have a single system, which stores their data, while 48% have multiple systems, he said.
“This means their data is still scattered all over and is difficult to use.” However, he says there is light at the end of the tunnel as 9% are starting to capture data into a single system while 16% are replacing a current system.
Data explosion
K"ohler-Kr"uner said: “We grew up with letters, phones, telexes, and faxes, and grew into e-mail, shared text databases like Lotus Notes, portals, Web sites, and mobile phones.”
He said the world is going through a massive transformation based on connecting people in real-time; smart and geographically aware mobile devices; and ubiquitous and cheap bandwidth.
However, he pointed out that this information explosion has consumed huge amounts of expensive and valuable resources - both human and technical.
With the disruption of social networks, organisations must redefine how they think about information management, control, and governance in order to deal with social technologies.
He suggested the use of systems of engagement which tools overlay and complement organisations deep investments in systems of record by providing Web-based access, usability across a variety of hardware and software platforms, and cross-organisational collaboration.
According to projections from Gartner, workers will spend anywhere from 30% to 40% of their time this year managing documents, up from 20% of their time in 1997.
The increase can be attributed to a variety of factors, including exponentially rising storage volumes, more complex information handling requirements, rapid change-over of staff and storage technology (shared LAN drives) that were developed over 30 years ago.
Improving business processes starts with information capturing, transforming and exchanging information is a high ROI solution streamlining business processes helps you make better decisions, faster, he said.
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