Unstructured data has proliferated across the average organisation, with little thought given to how this content should be stored, protected, managed and shared. Yet, there's a growing recognition that information that lives outside relational databases is every bit as important as the structured data that most companies manage with such rigorous discipline.
There's no quick and easy solution for ECM. It's resource-intensive.
According to a frequently cited stat from Gartner, around 80% of the content in most enterprises is unstructured data, such as e-mail, paper documents, scanned documents and images, PDF files, media such as sound and video files, text files, and presentations. The content is scattered across the organisation, often housed on end-user hard drives or in user-defined directories, with few rules about where this content is stored and how it's managed.
And the volume of this data is growing at a rapid clip, as organisations start to make more use of video and try to make sense of a growing volume of social media data. The result is that there's more demand for effective and affordable document and content management solutions than ever before, says Jaco Rossouw, head of the enterprise and information management centre of excellence at Business Connexion.
Unstructured content is often critical for legal compliance, essential to promoting accountability within the organisation, and represents corporate memory and intellectual capital, says Bennie Kotze, manager for enterprise information management at Datacentrix. That means enterprise content management (ECM) should be a C-suite level issue, with the board paying close attention to how the information the business has can support its strategy. "Traditionally, the discipline was a back-office thing," says Kotze. "It wasn't considered at board level."
Blurring lines
Trends driving adoption of ECM and electronic document management solutions include the need to store and retrieve paper documents more efficiently, the need to provide easy access to a centralised store of content in decentralised organisations, and the opportunities mobile and cloud technologies are creating for companies to provide their workforces with access to content wherever they are, says Itec COO Ryan Miles.
Consolidation of the ECM and EDM landscapes has pulled together disparate tools and processes into a centralised management console, says Mari'e Wessels, development manager at 3fifteen. This means ECM tools are rapidly becoming easier to use and configure, where they were once complex and cumbersome.
ECM has evolved to a point where a wide range of technologies used to capture, manipulate, store, retrieve and manage unstructured data have converged into integrated solutions, agrees Miles. This has lowered the barriers to adopting the technology, especially for smaller organisations.
Traditionally, the discipline was a back-office thing. It wasn't considered at board level.
When processes such as scanning documents are automated using technologies such as bar code readers, optical character recognition and optical mark recognition, companies can achieve massive cost-savings and time, while bringing these documents into electronic repositories where they can be easily found via metadata searches and accessed from anywhere, says Miles.
Mobility means information can filter into the organisation faster and allow executives to make quicker decisions, says Andrew Kirkland, country manager at Trustwave South Africa. But the challenge organisations face is ensuring the use of mobile devices to view, review and capture data does not expose customer information to security risks.
Despite the many benefits of ECM, most vendors admit that rolling out the technology can be time-consuming and fraught with complexity. They say most of the obstacles organisations run into as they roll out their ECM strategies are about business strategy and organisational culture, rather than technology. ECM tools are mature, but the organisations trying to use them often don't understand the complexities around the optimal use of information, says Kotze.
Politics and policies
In addition, ECM projects often stutter because of organisational politics (since knowledge is power, control and ownership data is fiercely contested in many organisations) and a lack of policy enforcement. That means companies shouldn't start implementing the tools until they grasp the importance of information to their business strategies, says Kotze.
Simply hashing out the accountabilities, responsibilities and conventions for naming, tagging, indexing and metadata can be a fraught and complex process in many organisations, Kotze notes. As a result, many companies have little consistency in how their unstructured content is managed and who has access to it.
One of the biggest challenges lies in change management, says Rossouw. Many end-users resist the radical sorts of change in the way they work that ECM demands. "There's no quick and easy solution for ECM," he adds. "It's resource-intensive."
Implementing a new tool without an understanding of the role of information in the business and before putting the right information management practices and processes in place, will simply result in poor user adoption and the ongoing existence of silos of information, says Kotze. That's why successful ECM projects need to be driven from the boardroom, but in such a way that they secure buy-in from the rank and file who will use the system.
ECM projects also need to be considered as part of a wider enterprise information strategy that spans both structured and unstructured content. The lines between content management and business intelligence are starting to blur into a larger discipline called enterprise information management.
In practice, users need to consume and analyse unstructured content along the lines of structured data if they are to have a fuller picture of what is going on in the business. For example, an organisation may need to access the relevant transactional data, plus supporting documents, such as contracts in the event of a legal dispute, says Kotze.
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