The Real Return of Content Management: Making Triple-Digit ROI a Reality |
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Although electronic document and content management applications have been around for decades, companies are continuing to see opportunities to streamline processes, reduce paper and storage and increase productivity with content management. With pricing pressure and lower-cost cloud solutions, Nucleus Research has found content management is now cost-effective for solving a broader set of business problems — where previous solutions were too costly to be practical. Analysis of the last 37 return on investment (ROI) case studies Nucleus Research has published on content management shows it returns an average of $6.12 for every dollar spent. Nucleus's analysis included ROI case studies of content management-related projects deployed primarily in the United States and Europe over the past eight years. Non-US projects were normalized in dollars for comparison purposes. In most cases, as software markets mature, companies making additional investments in areas like content management get only incremental ROI because they're consolidating or extending an existing project — not the initial big ROIs delivered by first-generation deployments. Content management has been a recognized market for more than a decade, yet projects are still delivering significant ROI because of three important factors. 1. Changes in content management deployment and
delivery 2. Remote work 3. Information overload Nucleus has found that second- and third-generation content management investments that drive greater productivity and more streamlined processes often delivered triple-digit ROI. So did content management projects that made enterprise application or customer relationship management data more accessible to a broader population as well as captured paper or electronic records automatically processed through workflows supported by content management applications. The volume of business-critical communications, such as emails, instant message conversations, application alerts and social media feeds, are also driving greater need for content repositories and automated tools for rules-based archival, retention and deletion. Given the changing dynamics of content management pricing, usability and delivery and business and regulatory requirements, there are a number of areas that are ripe for returns on content management investment in the next two years, including:
Although organizations often focus on cost savings, such as reduced paper and storage costs, as a motivation for investment in content management, productivity and other indirect benefits are also common. In the cases analyzed as part of this research, 62% of all returns came from direct benefits, such as reduced paper and staff or service bureau fee avoidance, and 38% of returns came from indirect benefits, such as productivity. Nucleus expects further disruptions in the content management market, as increased usability, availability of cloud content management applications and greater access to technologies, such as optical character recognition, drive broader adoption. Large firms can cost-effectively attack new content management problems that old solutions were too costly and unwieldy to justify, and smaller companies with limited resources can implement sophisticated content management solutions without adding IT staff or servers. Either way, as vendors improve the usability and accelerate the time to deployment of their applications, there will be even more opportunities for ROI from content management. As this analysis shows, even when incremental investments are considered, every dollar invested in content management delivers $6.12 in benefits. REBECCA WETTEMANN is vice president of Research at Nucleus Research, Inc., a leading provider of investigative information technology research and advisory services. For more, visit nucleusresearch.com or follow @NucleusResearch on Twitter. |