Do you know what your employee’s are doing on the social networks? Are they giving away trade secrets, or just sharing their daily life in the office? Have you considered these social networking sites can have record keeping and retention and disposal issues and concerns to contend with?

And that’s really only part of the problem – the other BIG issue is this – we cannot keep up with technology, and look after the legacy systems as well. We are drowning under an avalanche of information and we don’t seem to have a shovel to dig ourselves out.

So – what can you do?

Prioritise – what needs to be managed NOW – today.
What will you lose access to – if you don’t migrate the information?
Can you outsource the process of digitising old information?

We can’t do it all – ourselves – even though we may want to. After all, you never know what you will find. But we can’t, and neither we should – after all, not everything we’ve kept, needs to be “kept” – but that doesn’t mean you can stick your head in the sand and hope you’ve captured everything either.

Companies buried under avalanche of digital content – vnunet.com

Companies buried under avalanche of digital content

Three quarters of businesses failing to manage new communication media

Ian Williams

vnunet.com, 03 Apr 2009

Managing the growing deluge of electronic office documents is still a major challenge for nearly half of all businesses, according to research from non-profit content management organisation AIIM.

The group’s State of the ECM Industry 2009 report found that three quarters of companies have no control over modern business communication channels, such as instant messaging, blogs, wikis, social networks and text messaging.
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The research also revealed that the drivers behind enterprise content management have shifted from compliance to cost savings and efficiency over the past two years, as the credit crunch has started to have a greater impact.

“For many organisations, poorly managed and out-of-control information represents a huge potential source of bottom line savings in this tight economy. If only organisations would just take this cost saving seriously,” said John Mancini, president of AIIM.

“Controlled content can be fed into business processes to speed them up, cut down travel via project collaboration and form a knowledge base for the business. Uncontrolled content represents a lost opportunity, and a major compliance risk.”

AIIM’s study found that by bringing content into a controlled and searchable environment, companies can save money through more efficient business processes, lower storage requirements and enhanced productivity.

The survey also found that spending on document-centric business process management and workflow is likely to grow strongly in 2009, with enterprise search, email management, document management and records management all set to show positive growth over the coming months.