Organizing & Digitizing Content To Enhance Value

There is a spending wave happening in the Enterprise content management space with enterprises investing in content-management technology to convert that information into even more valuable assets and make it available to all its stakeholders. Driven by the need to cope with government regulations and a surfeit of unstructured data, companies are ramping up their spending on enterprise-content-management systems, according to a recent InformationWeek Research survey. Such systems embrace multiple technologies, including document management, Web content management, records management, and archiving. SOX has been a major driver for adopting enterprise content management. The law, which requires companies to document and test internal controls over financial reporting, has challenged companies to move beyond spreadsheets toward building dedicated repositories for collecting information on internal processes. While many US companies plan to spend more than $500,000 on content-management technology and services this year, most of them are unsure of the ROI on these investments. Document management is the most common component of an enterprise-content management-implementation. DM covers a broad range of technologies, including document and content capture, workflow, document repositories, computer output to laser disk and electronic-report-management systems, and information-retrieval systems. Web content management , record management or archiving and retention and document capture and imaging are related areas seeing more activity. The growth of unstructured content such as E-mails, images, and handwritten documents is a driver of enterprise-content-management adoption. In the health-care industry, adoption of electronic patient records and storage of electronic images such as X-rays is leading hospitals and other providers to invest heavily in content management. Public-sector organizations, with their reliance on paper forms, are a natural for content-management implementations. State and local governments are spending heavily on geographic information systems to let citizens use mapping-based applications, which depend on content-management systems to organize geospatial data such as topographies, addresses, and images. I beleive that the ROI assessmens can become easier when enteprises begin to embrace the next phase of evolution: Information Lifecycle Management, a strategy for aligning IT infrastructure with the needs of the business—based on information’s changing value.ILM is an ever-growing and evolving process. In order to realize the benefits of the ILM process, IT must continuously review the usage patterns of its storage resources and ensure adherence to policies and procedures. The new SRM /ADM tools, makes monitoring the process easy. New advances in ATA and SATA disk will play an important role in helping IT administrators with ILM, giving them the ability to stage backups and snapshots inexpensively. Software innovations around SRM and ADM have also increased the ability to identify data, classify data and move data to the proper location over time. One may also note that the enterprise majors Viz SAP, Oracle , Microsoft etc have no/minimal presence in these niche areas in enterprise space- we may see majors making some moves here - oracle recently acquired the assets of ContextMedia recently.