With a large influx of data in the enterprise, more companies may need document management software to keep up with all of the information coming their way. According to the InformationWeek Content Management in the Enterprise Survey however, many businesses still don’t have a plan for managing content.
In a recent InformationWeek article, Kurt Marko wrote that companies that have a document management system need to first have a plan to see how they will go about arranging the large amount of documents involved in business.
According to the survey, 48 percent of respondents didn’t have a plan for content management and another 16 percent didn’t know if there was a plan. The website said managing documents boils down to saving the data the business needs for an appropriate amount of time and getting rid of everything else. The survey said organizations are living in “content chaos” instead of figuring out a way to deal with it. Only one in five of those who responded to the survey make a habit of deleting files at the end of their retention period, which Marko said is a poor strategy.
“The lack of a strategy can have repercussions beyond cluttered hard drives,” Marko said. “For one, all this information eats up storage space, and simply throwing more disk at the problem won’t scale. For another, reams of unordered content make it hard for business users and IT to meet regulatory and compliance requirements for specific kinds of data and lead to costly searches in the event of an e-discovery exercise.”
Marko said enterprise content management software can structure, order and apply rules to information that can inherently be unstructured. He writes that if a business has a plan for its information, the system can be useful to cluttered businesses of all sizes.
As an example, Campus Technology’s website said Georgetown University in Washington, D.C, Davidson University in North Carolina and University of Virginia Investment Management Co. in Charlottesville have all recently started to use a document management system to help organize the large amount of information the universities take in.
Georgetown, specifically, is using document management software to improve international student admissions, the news source said, as it will use the system to capture, manage and store files so advisers can review digital documents wherever they happen to be working. The documents will then be routed back to admissions staff for further processing.
Without a proper implementation strategy, no amount of document management initiatives will create an ordered business process. Appropriate planning and organizing are vital to meeting a company’s objectives. Setting and reaching any goal with an organization first begins in the planning phase, and companies need to be prepared to formulate and strategize in order to manage their business processes successfully.
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