Brian Hill, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, noted – alarmingly – that a recent survey conducted into e-discovery showed fewer than one in five respondents were ‘confident that, if challenged, their organisation could demonstrate that its electronically stored information was accurate, accessible and trustworthy.’ With such negative consequences, why are only a handful of enterprises governing their content?

As companies become increasingly ‘content savvy’, generating content everyday by means of email, instant messaging, Web sites and documents, they are struggling to take control of large and growing content ‘mountains’. Research by Forrester suggests that less than a quarter of businesses have an end-to-end approach to gather and filter data, (of which content is a part). However, data not only needs to be gathered and filtered, but to ensure accuracy and accessibility, businesses need to know what content they have that shapes the data and its quality: are there duplicates?

Is a standard template in place? Is it consistent with the company’s brand? Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) is the end-to-end process of creating, implementing and maintaining content quality standards and is an effective way to achieve the aforementioned criteria. By implementing ECoG, companies can lower the cost and risk of compliance, ensure brand governance, minimise total cost of ownership, maximize worker productivity and protect the organisation’s key knowledge assets.

Legislation and compliance

With increasing varieties of content being used as evidence in a civil or criminal legal case, multi-national enterprises should prepare themselves for potential e-discovery requests. Yet according to Forrester, two-thirds of businesses consider their e-discovery strategy reactive.

A reactive approach won’t sit well with the courts. Also, to comply with discovery of electronic records, is the requirement that records be produced in a timely manner. With ever growing volumes of content, e-discovery is time-consuming and expensive if you’re not prepared.

The challenge is to ensure a company’s content complies with both internal policy and external regulatory standards – without compromising the ability to publish as needed to support the business. Get it wrong, and there are huge financial and legal implications.

Enterprises need to be ‘e-discovery ready’. By utilising ECoG offerings, large businesses and Governments worldwide can implement content management and compliance policies within an infrastructure of best practice methods – optimising corporate knowledge, whilst reducing company exposure to legislative risk.

The need to work smarter

A common issue many businesses and organisations face is how to work smarter and faster, saving time and money. When it comes to content, the question must be asked, ‘Is the content in the optimal storage location and condition for the content consumers?’ The ability for a company to capture, share, organise, find and use its knowledge efficiently has a direct impact on its ability to be productive, competitive and ultimately, profitable.

By implementing content quality processes, content can be structured and tagged automatically according to the need of the business, making it suddenly much easier to locate, within the content management system ‘warehouse’. Duplication is avoided and content can therefore be reused smartly; enabling existing corporate information to be built upon, rather than reinvented. Optimising corporate knowledge leads to increased corporate innovation and a competitive edge.

The need to reduce storage costs

With increasing volumes of content comes the need to store that information somewhere. Without a process in place to ensure the quality of information, who knows if data is being duplicated, taking up double or triple the amount of space that’s required – and costing money to do so.

As much as 50% of an organisation’s content is typically redundant with copies of the same information stored in multiple locations or retained for compliance. Imposing ECoG removes this content, meaning that less storage is needed, substantially reducing operating costs.

Green: an added benefit

Aside from the cost benefit, ECoG can also contribute towards companies and organisations fulfilling their ‘green’ agenda: fewer servers equals lower power consumption and reduced heat generation. In this way, companies can both save money and be green.

For those up against the challenge of IT budget cuts, a solid argument is required for investing in new technologies. Expenditure on ECoG can be recouped by avoiding fines associated with compliance (a well-known international fast food company allegedly spends $100,000 dollars in fines every day because it cannot respond to an e-discovery request in time); eliminating situations where staff productivity is squandered on reproducing content that already exists; and reducing spend on powering and cooling datacentre disk drives, which IDC estimates costs £21.93 a year per drive.

In addition to this, ECoG can be achieved quickly; an automated analysis of 150,000 pages can take just three weeks. The decision to implement a content quality framework that delivers Enterprise Content Governance should be a strategic imperative for large corporations and Government departments alike.