As video takes off in the enterprise, IT leaders need to plan how they'll handle content management and bandwidth demands.

Gartner forecasts that by 2013, more than 25% of the content that workers see in a day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio. The proliferation of video within the enterprise will call for changes in content authoring training and procedures, information management strategy and improvements in analytic technologies.

“Consumerization has proven a force of unmatched potency in the past and the same will be true when it comes to the explosive spike in the popularity of consumer online video, fueling a similar interest in video within enterprises,” said Whit Andrews, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Video use on the Web is growing swiftly, with 73% of the Internet audience watching a video online at least monthly, that is about 90 million viewers.”

A Gartner survey shows that content management for images and video is growing. Only 44% of enterprises have it today, but 22% plan to deploy it this year (stet, 2009.) “Users who film their children and pets at home and upload the results to the Internet in minutes will not accept onerous restrictions of inflexible security, access controls or forced metadata schemes in the workplace,” says Andrews.

In the future, digital asset management technologies will make it possible to incorporate video into other document types and search abilities will greatly improve.

You can find more information in Gartner’s report, “Video Killed the Document Czar” (registration required).

Amy Schurr is the former managing features editor of Network World.