Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
Okay, I've got a confession to make. I might be guilty of spreading an urban legend. Yikes!
Many of us who present on content management often cite a 1998 study by Coopers & Lybrand (1998) in our presentations. Here are some of the typical data points:
- 90% of corporate memory exists on paper
- Out of pages that get handled in the office, 90% are merely shuffled
- The average document gets copied 19 times
- Companies spend an estimated $20 in labor to file a document, $120 in labor to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labor to reproduce a lost document
- 7.5% of all documents get lost, 3% of the remainder get misfiled, a total 10.5% of problematic documents
- Professionals spend 5-15% of their time reading information but spend 50% looking for it
- A typical worker spends thirty minutes to two hours a day searching for documents
While many of us have used these stats in a million presentations, I wonder, "Does anyone have the original report? Does anyone know the actual name of the report?"
One of the speakers at a recent AIIM seminar on ECM mentioned the data, and an attendee asked for the original source. Having used the data a million times myself, I searched through my hard drive. No dice. Then I turned to the web. No dice. Many references to the "1998 Coopers & Lybrand report," but no actual copy or link.
Oops.
To satisfy my compulsiveness, I'm appealing to the readers of this blog. Does anyone have the actual report? I'm offering a bounty and, more importantly, fame and fortune in the content management community to anyone who can deliver the actual report to me.
I will give a free AIIM membership for a year ($179) for anyone who can deliver the actual report to my email.
While I'm at it cleaning up loose ends, how about the ORIGINAL source for an even more difficult one -- "80% of the information in organizations is unstructured." Same deal.
