Data, documents and information offer a wealth of value to organisations. But with current developments, organisations are failing to harness this value. The cause lies in the fragmentation of these data, documents and information. Moreover, much information is dark data, simply untraceable. Intelligent information management offers organisations a solution to make optimal use of information in the organisation and also offers drastic efficiency improvements.

When finding, accessing, sharing and managing information, organisations often rely on multiple disconnected storage locations, systems and silos. Employees need to know in which system, SharePoint site or network folder relevant and important information is stored. This leads to inefficiencies because the ways and structures to store information differ from person to person.

Intelligent information management is about more than documents

Files and documents are only part of the total data that organisations need to manage. Structured data (data) is just as important and should be linked to unstructured data, in other words content (documents). As an organisation, unstructured data such as contracts, invoices and drawings are best linked to structured data such as customers, projects or a certain status. That linkage advocates intelligent information management rather than document management or ECM.

For this reason, leading research firm Gartner has rebranded the new generation of ECM as "content services" and awarded M-Files as a visionary. The repository or storage system is no longer relevant. The new generation of information management platforms offers a dynamic approach instead of an approach based one centralised system.

The dark data struggle

Plenty of tools exist to manage information efficiently, but what actually prevents organisations from actually doing so?

The amount of information within organisations doubles approximately every 16 months.

Veritas estimates that about half of business information is so-called dark data. This kind of data is stored in various business systems and locations, but cannot be used directly in making business decisions. Simply because this information has not been analysed and is not directly accessible.

Due to the difficulties in finding relevant information and documents when needed, our experience shows that about 80 per cent of documents are never used again and 70 per cent of documented information is recreated.

The result is that information workers spend about a third of their working time searching for information. They do not know where it is stored, who stored it or how it is named.

It is also important to be able to identify business-critical information from irrelevant clutter and discover information that matters in a particular context at a particular time. For example, to make important decisions, but also to discover new opportunities.

Thanks to intelligent information management, the storage location of information becomes irrelevant. Information, documents and data are linked together so that it becomes more findable in the first place, but above all gives context to information. M-Files is the intelligent information management platform of the future that addresses all these issues.

Curious what this looks like in practice? Attend a no-obligation online demonstration of M-Files.