* 93% of all information today is created in an electronic format
Businesses receive, generate and store enormous amounts of information. According to an analysis from the University of California at Berkeley several years ago, 93% of all information today is created in an electronic format.
Further, more than 70% of that information is never printed. The vast majority of business information is generated by, and stored in, a large number of applications, including corporate e-mail systems, personal Webmail systems, the World Wide Web, instant messaging systems, wikis, blogs, CRM systems, Web conferencing systems, image-processing systems, inventory systems, DVDs, video tapes, audio sources (e.g., Podcasts) and a wide variety of other applications. Unified communications will make the problem significantly worse as it adds additional data to the already crowded mix.
There are a number of problems associated with the rapidly expanding quantity and breadth of information that business decision makers must process, including poor decision making, stress, more expensive information management, greater difficulty in managing corporate governance issues and even reduced IQ in some cases.
Most organizations cannot adequately access the information they possess because they lack the appropriate search tools to retrieve these internal information sources.
The result is that most organizations are inadequately prepared for appropriate corporate governance or legal actions. For example, in 75% of U.S. legal actions, e-mail must be produced as part of the discovery process, an issue that is now much more important because of the new amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) that took effect on December 1, 2006. This has significant impacts on the need to archive information, but also simply for the ability to search across all of an organization’s data stores to find the information you need to do your job.
We recently wrote a white paper for Openfind, a company focused on enterprise. You can download a copy of the white paper here.
