Web 2.0 content ‘out of control’

Firms are struggling to get to grips with the electronic data  that they increasingly produce and  compliance is increasingly coming second best to cost-effectiveness according to AIIM’s annual ‘State of the ECM Industry’ report.

In the survey, nearly half of the firms surveyed (47%) are finding managing electronic office documents a challenge and for three quarters modern business communication channels such as instant messages, text messages, blogs and wikis are stated as being uncontrolled and off the corporate radar.

Moreover 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.

The good news is though that electronic document and content management solutions are working. According to the 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.

AIMM believes that the bottom line is that compared with other significant technology investments, ECM implementations have generally produced better returns. The survey also found that spending on document-centric 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.

For John Mancini, President of AIIM, poorly managed and out of control information represented a huge potential source of bottom line savings. “If only organisations 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.”