February 16, 2005

"Unstructured and unorganized data is no longer a resource in an information society," wrote John Naisbitt in Megatrends. "Instead, it becomes the true enemy of the information worker."

What Naisbitt already characterized as a "level of information...clearly impossible to handle by present means" way back in 1982 has become far more of a problem in the years since then.

A lot is at stake, explains analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe of Ovum. "Critical information is getting lost in the deluge." When information is lost, so are deals, customers, and revenues, so every business should pay attention. Unfortunately, as Pelz-Sharpe notes, this "is such a remarkably dull topic that keeping anyone's interest for more than a few minutes can be tough."

That's a kind of implicit advice to enterprise content management (ECM) vendors to gussy up their sales talk. Instead of discussing the efficiencies of filing, for example, vendors need to talk about what happens when, say, the right copy of a contract can't be located.

Still, getting an ECM system doesn't necessarily end the content sprawl problem (although it goes a long way in mitigating it).

Pelz-Sharpe is skeptical that the root of the problem can ever be eradicated -- simply because of the proliferation of content and content nodes, and the near impossibility of routing everything through a single content repository -- but he does suggest that there is something vendors do.

"Procedures and protocols need to be developed to give advice on how to recognise and address genuine business content, and how to remove and destroy junk," he writes. "This activity needs to be led by database and infrastructure vendors, working together with specialists in the records, document and content management arenas."

Unfortunately, this is something that is not going to happen until customers start calling for it.

Call for it they should, given that a good content strategy is, as Naisbitt notes, part of making underperforming information workers more productive; generically, as a way of improving the signal-to-noise ratio in favor of businesses, it also plugs in to the discussion about spam and malware; and, for those considering or deploying a portal, vendor coordination.

At some point, the proliferation of unorganized, irrelevant, and malicious content is going to make businesses demand a unified solution, but until then there might be some competitive advantage to be had in drafting and executing your own strategy.

Source: Line 56