Five Facts About Content Management - Test Your ECM Savvy

1. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has become a strategic imperative for most organizations. Businesses have seen a huge explosion of structured and unstructured information over the last several years that includes documents, e-mail messages, voice mail, and video. A recent study by Accenture shows that more content will be created in the next two years than in the entire previous history of humankind. It will be critical for organizations to have a strategy to manage unstructured content through its entire life cycle—creation, management, storage, and disposal. - Brice Dunwoodie quoting Microsoft in CMS Wire, September 2005.

2. Users get it. They understand that managing documents and content is important stuff. A recent AIIM survey data reveals that 91% of users say that managing documents is “important” or “extremely important” to their business objectives. Seventy-seven percent say it has gotten more so in the last 2 years. Users understand that using ECM to drive productivity improvements is just as important a business driver as insuring compliance. Why ECM? Equal parts productivity and compliance. - John Mancini, President of AIIM, in AIIM E-DOC Magazine November/December 2005.

3. Companies that have neglected documenting and recording the right information are waking up to the fact that it's a must-do for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. "Records management is a sleeping giant" of compliance, observes Lee Dittmar, principal and leader of the enterprise governance consulting practice at Deloitte Consulting LLP in Philadelphia. "There's a tremendous amount of data to manage, and most companies don't have the policies or tools to find what they need when they need it. That represents one of the biggest compliance risks any company can have." - Tad Leahy, originally printed in Business Finance, 03/06.

4. In both document and data capture, savings are measured in seconds, multiplied by thousands of documents. The savings can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a year, especially if the capture system can also improve the quality of the scanned information. - The Dynamics of Cost in Document and Data Capture, whitepaper by Kofax Image Products March 2006.

5. BPM gains traction. Now more than a buzzword, BPM (business process management) has become a viable means for businesses to improve internal efficiencies and gain competitive advantage.
Performance management capabilities not only allow businesses to maximize internal efficiencies to reduce operating expenses, they also help companies increase revenue opportunities.

"Companies today are focused on growth, and they are using BPM technologies to bring new products and services to market more quickly," says Hyland's Bill Priemer. "The flexibility that BPM tools provide allows IT departments to focus their resources on enabling the delivery of new products, rather than focusing on administering hard-coded integration between multiple systems." - Ken Congdon, Integrated Solutions December 2005.