Forget Big Data, It’s Time to Focus on Real Data

by Ian Campbell June 8, 2016
default image

George Carlin had a famous stand-up routine about stuff. He had a more colorful name for it, of course, but he basically defined the human existence as a cycle of acquiring things. We are collectors by nature and he talked about how we fill a house with all of our useless ‘stuff,’ only to go out and buy a bigger house … so we could continue buying yet more ‘stuff.’ It was funny in large part because it’s so true.

A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff — George Carlin 

Many of us have attics, basements, spare rooms and even garages filled with clothes we’ll never wear again, broken AC units and gadgets so outdated they probably don’t even work anymore. Hey, is that a Blackberry over there?

So why exactly do we devote so much space to store ‘stuff’ we don’t need? If you’re not a hoarder and have the extra room, it’s probably not a big problem. But there has to be a more constructive use for this space.

We carry this same obsession to collect ‘stuff’ into the business world – especially when it comes to data. In fact, we did a recent analysis and found that nearly 25 percent of the information an organization stores is no longer useful for business. No value. Extraneous data that is clogging up your resources and taking up precious storage space.

It’s one thing to have outdated clothes gathering dust in your attic and feeding the moths. But storing data is costly, and often comes at a premium. When you look at where enterprise companies invest in technology, storage has consistently been high and seems to becoming a disproportionally larger share of the spend. Clearing out a quarter of that space for data that actually matters could significantly boost ROI.

In addition to clogging up your storage, data bloat is draining productivity. Not only do you have unnecessary ‘stuff’ choking your infrastructure, but 32 percent of your data is scattered across multiple systems. So after rummaging through the attic, basement and guest room for that sweater, you are now taking apart the garage. Which is wasting time. Again, if this cuts into your weekend, perhaps you don’t care. But if employees are struggling to quickly access the data they need, this becomes a business problem. A challenge that Enterprise Content Management (ECM) aims to address.

Unfortunately, the ECM industry has focused on rapid access to data with less attention to the increasingly complex data labyrinth useless data leaves behind. While some vendors are better than others, in general they need to move past addressing the symptoms of faster information gathering to refining automation features that automatically nominate unnecessary data for deletion. Be it duplicate content, buried information or the need for improved search criteria; solutions like more integrated systems, better content management and findability can put a plug into drains on productivity. We’ve calculated that ECM customers lose an average of eight percent of their work hours just searching for the right content.

There is a clear opportunity for ECM vendors to differentiate themselves and significantly grow market share by developing solutions that tackle data bloat and boost productivity. It’s an attractive value sell that will improve overall operations and easily secure CFO approval. Forget the bigger house when you can make better use of the rooms you already have.