According to analysts, 85% of relevant documents are never found during search, 60% are obsolete, and yet another statistic claims that 50% of documents are duplicates. According to the 2012 Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council, 69% of data organizations keep can and should be deleted. If these numbers are even close to being true, no one is doing a very good job of managing content. Although it seems almost too basic, the reason for storing content is to use it. But these numbers imply that few organizations have any type of plan on access, availability, or re-use.
I don’t know the answer. Before the explosion of content (whenever that was) perhaps unstructured content wasn’t considered a vital component in day-to-day business operations and as such was pretty much ignored. In many organizations it still is ignored. Although I think there is more recognition of unmanaged content being an issue and the tendency to ignore it now is that it can be a daunting task to solve the problem.
To achieve the business benefits of managing content from an information lifecycle management approach, the ability to classify content to a taxonomy and the ability to apply policy enabled by metadata management are vital. Content then becomes a knowledge asset and the business value extracted from information is optimized. For this to be achieved organizations will need to address cleaning up their content in regards to duplicates and obsolete content. The problems impact the ability to make decisions on the most accurate and relevant information. From the perspective of steering the organizational ship this should be a priority.
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