In a world where speed of response is a highly prized commodity for businesses, being able to respond accurately and rapidly to prospects, customers and internal requests is a critical asset. Data is the foundation of modern business and the simple truth is that you cannot build a business when those foundations are fragmented, inaccessible or out-of-date. That is only going to lead to missed opportunities and loss of business.
As a result, enterprise content management (ECM) is on most organisations list of ‘must have’ tools. Without content management, from an ECM platform such as Microsoft SharePoint, information is just data – unsorted, unusable and costly.
As a CIO there are searching questions to ask of a business:
- How much data is in your SharePoint sites – and how many sites do you have?
- How do your compliance officers cope with data proliferation and the risk of lost documents?
- What is the financial cost of the offsite storage and retrieval of paper documents?
If you cannot answer these questions, or the answers terrify, then you should really start to look at how automating your SharePoint environment can make a significant difference to your operations. We describe the proliferation of unstructured content as a ‘data whirlwind’ – documents which are edited and uploaded to varied network locations; emails arriving and being sent; incoming and outgoing post; all changing all day, every day and increasing exponentially.
This is a surprisingly common situation, according to Gartner Group, “Enterprise content will grow 650% by 2014,” but here is the shocker, “80% of it remains unstructured.” Given such predictions, there is a good chance your business will be dealing with unstructured data, and if that is the case then your business is going to be more disorganised and less controlled which means there is a greater chance for non-compliant, ‘risky’ material to get caught up in the daily workflow. Consider mistakenly sending out an old, uncontrolled version of a contract to a new customer with key clauses missing, one wrong document could be the difference between profit and loss on the deal.
There is certainly no difficulty in creating the data, so much so that getting historical data in and out of your ECM has become the biggest barrier to making effective use of SharePoint. ReadSoft offers one simple, standardised solution which can capture any document and convert the data to indexed digital files will reduce labour and costs associated with managing/storing paper documents, and moves a business in a positive direction.
To learn more download our latest whitepaper here
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