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Manufacturers need to think harder about document management, warns Butler Group
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09/05/2008
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Manufacturers should look beyond the requirements of compliance for their DRM (document and records management) implementations, if they don’t want them to fail.
That’s the warning from analyst Butler Group, which states that when organisations think wider about document management – for example, also enabling users to save all unstructured information into a central repository for easy access and sharing – they can derive far greater benefits, in terms of cost efficiencies.
Sue Clarke, senior research analyst at Butler Group, points to research by parent firm Datamonitor, which indicates that enterprise content management (ECM) now has a market penetration of more than 80%, yet over 40% of organisations are planning to invest in new systems or expand their solutions in the next two years.
“One of the reasons … is that the original implementation failed or was less than successful,” says Clarke. “This is especially true where the major driver for the implementation was compliance and the functionality was therefore centred only on DRM.”
She warns that many companies were panicked into buying systems due to fear of failures over compliance, which in turn resulted in insufficient planning.
“By implementing DRM now, organisations can take the time required to adequately plan the implementation, select a product that provides the closest fit to their requirements, ensure that end-user buy-in to the new system is achieved, and make sure that all information sources are managed by the new system,” she says.
Clarke insists that this is also the only sensible approach for organisations that have large volumes of unstructured information to manage – even those that do not have any need to retain information for compliance purposes and have not yet implemented DRM.
And she adds: “Many organisations do not realise the implications of not managing their unstructured information properly until a request is made for information by a regulator, or a court. The issue often is not the fact that an organisation may have destroyed information, but that the company has no idea whether the requested information still exists.”
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Author
Brian Tinham
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