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
b
usiness 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.”