CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
4 March 2008
Company News
New Survey From AIIM Reveals Organizations Continue to Struggle With Unstructured Information
EMC Corporation unveiled the results of an exclusive content management survey the company sponsored in conjunction with AIIM.
The survey, which polled more than 200 IT business professionals, reveals that today's businesses and government organizations continue to struggle with management of "unstructured" information, which represents the majority of data collected and accessible to enterprises - including scanned images, Word files, spreadsheets, presentations and e-mail. While 99 percent of respondents admitted that unstructured information played a significant role in driving their business processes, most identified major challenges if unstructured information was not readily available as part of those processes.
"Unstructured information drives numerous business processes - but all too often, organizations cannot leverage this information effectively, leading to inconsistent communications between functions, duplication of effort, poor decision-making, higher costs, and non-compliance with internal best practices," said Carl Frappaolo, AIIM Vice President, Market Intelligence. "Unfortunately, enterprise content management deployment today is a major challenge, as traditional ECM solutions require greater effort than many believe is reasonable or justifiable."
Nearly half of respondents (47 percent) reported that today's content management offerings require too much effort to implement, with integration of disparate technology components (37 percent) and integration with legacy systems (34 percent) accounting for the biggest delays in developing business solutions on top of ECM platforms. Because of these integration challenges, half of respondents indicated that they wanted solutions built on top of an ECM platform.
"Companies and government agencies today are demanding content-enabled solutions to help them more effectively incorporate unstructured content into critical business processes," said Mark Lewis, President, Content Management and Archiving Division at EMC. "At EMC, we are committed to investing in and providing solutions that directly address these customer challenges -- in a way not addressed by any other vendor in the market today."
"Customers are looking for solutions built on top of scalable ECM platforms, such as EMC Documentum, that include pre-built integrations into complementary content management products, ECM platform-certified partner technologies, and a full range of professional services and partner offerings to complement industry and business process expertise," said Balaji Yelamanchili, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Content Management and Archiving at EMC. "By leveraging this strategic approach to content management, employees can make faster and better decisions, share information across functions, and ensure consistent communications among decision-makers."
To listen to a podcast about the AIIM survey and results, please visit http://software.edgeboss.net/download/software/aiimecmsurvey.mp3
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