Content Overload

According to InformationWeek, and any IT person with their eyes open... Companies are choking on information employees create

How are companies to bring the plethora of unstructured information under control?

What is unstructured data?

The problem comes from "unstructured" information, a catchall term for content that's not managed and stored by a business system such as a data warehouse or an enterprise-resource-planning system. It's the soft but critical content about business decisions, projects, ideas, research efforts, or procedures that can be stored in myriad places.

The inability to find critical content means it's sometimes duplicated instead of reused. That can drain productivity, delay product rollouts, and hurt customer relationships. Worse yet is the idea that while companies have invested heavily in hardware and software for creating content, they're benefiting from only a portion of it because they have no idea where much of the content is.

If it's stored in E-mail or on someone's laptop, then it's forgotten.

The problem ECM is attempting to solve is a fundamental concept of Management Information Systems, "Getting the right information to the right person at the right time." But as InformationWeek points out, when it comes to the exploding quantity of unstructured data employees create each day, many companies have realized that if the best they can hope for is to collect the right information and make it easy to search, at least they're that much closer to meeting their goals.

For more information on Enterprise Content Management, see the collaborative book on the ECM Initiative