Have you ever given thought to the value of the unstructured information in your business?

Unstructured information refers to everything residing outside of your relational databases and includes information such as email, paper documents (PODs, contracts, correspondence) and electronic documents (MS Office – Excel, Word etc). If you had to loose all your unstructured information today, would you be able to continue with your business activities uninterrupted and without potentially loosing money? If you answer yes to this question then unstructured information in your business has value. And the extent of the value will be determined by the level of disruption the loss of your unstructured information is likely to cause.

The loss of all your unstructured information is a worst case scenario. The nature of unstructured information makes it difficult to manage and use efficiently, unless it is done with the aid of and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) System (The evolvement of Imaging Systems and Document Management Systems culminated in ECM systems). When we see the term “Enterprise” we immediately assume such systems to be expensive, difficult to use and require large IT infrastructures to operate. This does not hold true any more. The industry has done smaller businesses a disservice by creating the perception that these systems are only for large corporate organizations. The benefits of using ECM systems apply equally well, and most often more so, to smaller companies. In the past the affordability of ECM systems deprived smaller companies of the benefits. Today, however, ECM systems are within the reach of even a small one man business.

What makes the use of an ECM system essential? When all is considered it boils down to “access to information” – fast, accurate, reliable and concurrent. It is about accessing a copy of the POD electronically when the customer phones about a query (and not having to search for it in a file and call back the customer to resolve the query, and misfiling it thereafter), it is about having your contracts under control and be pro-actively alerted a month before the contract expires (and not a month after the contact expired), it is about finding the email that referred to an important matter immediately (and not have to spend 5 minutes in Outlook to find it), it is about giving your auditors access to the electronic copies of documents when doing your audit (as opposed to having one or more of your staff members providing paper support to the auditors), it is about not loosing or misfiling documents, more than one person getting access to the same document at the same time, and the list goes on.

If any of the above situations apply to your business you will undoubtedly benefit from the use of an ECM system.