Electronic Content Still out of Control

Posted by Mark Brousseau

In its annual “State of the ECM Industry” research report, released at its conference and exposition here in Philadelphia, AIIM has found that managing electronic office documents is still a challenge for 47 percent of organizations, and that modern business communication channels—instant messages, text messages, blogs and wikis—are uncontrolled and off the corporate radar for 75 percent of businesses. Additionally, e-mail is still out of control, with 55 percent of organizations having little or no confidence that important emails are recorded, complete and retrievable. However, AIIM’s research also found that whereas two years ago compliance was the main driver for bringing this content into a controlled and searchable environment, cost savings and efficiency are now the main motivating factors.

According to the AIIM survey, for those that have invested in ECM or document and records management solutions, hard dollar savings have on the whole turned out on plan, and soft dollar benefits have exceeded expectations. Compared to other significant technology investments, ECM implementations have generally produced better returns.

John Mancini, President of AIIM, comments, “For many organizations, poorly managed and out of control information represents a huge potential source of bottom line savings in this tight economy — if only organizations would just take this cost saving seriously. Controlled content can be fed into business processes to speed them up, cut down travel via project collaboration, and form a knowledge base for the business. Uncontrolled content represents a lost opportunity – and a major compliance risk.”

The survey also found that spending on Business Process Management (BPM) and Workflow was likely to grow strongly in 2009, with Enterprise Search, Email Management, Document Management and Records Management all set to show positive growth.

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