Pam Doyle, from Fujitsu, gave an incredible presentation at the AIIM roadshow in Chicago which contained some interesting “fast facts” about document management that I thought were worth repeating. These reminders of the value of document management are particularly relevant given the coming tightening of IT resources:
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Companies spend $20 in labor to file a document, $120 in labor to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labor to reproduce a lost document.
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7.5 percent of all documents get lost; 3 percent of the remainder get misfiled.
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Professionals spend 5 – 15 percent of their time reading information, but up to 50 percent looking for it.
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The average document photocopied 19 times.
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There are over 4 trillion paper documents in the U.S. alone and they are growing at a rate of 22% per year (PricewaterhouseCoopers).
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Corporate users received an average of 18 megabytes (MB) of e-mail per day in 2007; E-mail is expected to grow to over 28 MB per day by 2011.
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Users send and receive an average of 133 e-mail messages per day (Radicati Group).
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A single FAX machine costs $6,200 per year (Captaris); the average time to manually FAX a document is 8 minutes.
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The average cost to send a package via courier service is between $8 and $15.
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The cost of office space has increased 19% (Office Space Across the World 2008).
The benefits of document management are obvious, but seeing maximum ROI requires a well thought out strategy. It sounds obvious, but you would be shocked by how many organizations set out to manage their information assets without a plan. To help get you started, here are my "Ten Commandments for an Effective Document Management Project."
