Author: Alfredo DeVanna, Vice President & Managing Director
Demand for ECM products to reach $4.5 billion in 2010
The increasing need for companies to effectively manage content at an enterprise level is driving significant interest in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) products and methodologies even in a recessionary economy.
According to analyst firm Gartner Inc. demand for ECM products will exceed $4.5 billion in 2010 as companies look to use enterprise content more effectively to automate business processes, increase operational efficiencies, reduce costs and cut down on redundant and repetitive content.
Though the costs associated with ECM technologies can be fairly significant, the Return On Investment can be even greater for medium and large companies according to AIIM the industry’s leading enterprise content management association.
If implemented correctly ECM technologies can help companies get a handle on all of the unstructured enterprise data that they might have residing in widely distributed databases, word processing documents, as Web content, rich media files, spreadsheets and other file formats.
Drivers and benefits of ECM
The ROI on achieving such centralized control of enterprise content can be enormous, especially considering the fact that almost 80% of all enterprise content is unstructured and growing at roughly 200% a year, according to Forrester Research. For one thing, implementing ECM can engender far better reuse of enterprise content.
ECM gives companies the ability to publish content once and then push it out to various mediums and platforms as required, thereby eliminating the need for costly duplication and storage. Managing content using ECM tools also results in better content integrity, version control, records management and data security.
In addition the ability to search for enterprise content and gain online access to it can be greatly enhanced via the use of ECM tools.
The costs of not implementing ECM
An effective ECM strategy can help enterprises reduce the costs associated with content management. According to statistics from PricewaterhouseCoopers, companies on average spend $20 in labor costs to file a document and as much as $120 in labor to find a misfiled document.
Companies typically lose one out of every 20 documents and spend 25 hours reproducing it at an average cost of $220 per document. ECM can help trim such costs by enabling companies to streamline the manner in which content is produced, stored, archived, distributed, reproduced, shared and destroyed.
Compliance and efficiency
Such capabilities, offered by ECM solutions, are especially needed at a time when government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley are forcing companies to put procedures in place for tracking certain categories of enterprise content more closely.
ECM tools are crucial to making enterprise content available more efficiently to workers, suppliers, business partners and others in an increasingly Web-enabled environment.
About the Author
Alfredo DeVanna, is Vice President Solutions Architect and a Managing Partner at Yakidoo. He has over 10 years of international experience deploying over 80 critical information technology and enterprise content management systems. He is fluent in English and Spanish.
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