The explosion of text documents, spreadsheets, images and e-mail messages represents a risk to enterprises because most of that information is not managed.
This is according to Rich Buchheim, senior director of enterprise content management strategy at Oracle.
"When organisations recognise this 'unstructured data` represents between 70% and 80% of company information, they realise the importance of enterprise content management (ECM) for cataloguing and managing access to company intellectual property."
According to Buchheim, only structured numerical data stored in databases tends to be properly managed in today`s enterprises, leaving the larger proportion of company information vulnerable.
Buchheim says ECM enables organisations to gain control of their information and information policies to mitigate risks from litigation, legal discovery, disasters and cyber crimes.
"Other major value propositions of ECM include productivity gains and cost savings by providing a consolidated solution rather than disparate, costly and specialised tools not tailored to mainstream knowledge workers."
However, Buchheim cautions against choosing ECM solutions that require too many changes to business processes, do not scale, lack flexible functionality and have far-reaching licensing implications because of dependencies on other underlying systems.
"It is important for ECM solutions to provide a proper content infrastructure that delivers real management capabilities and not just visibility across systems," he adds.
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