Product category:
Training Aids and eCommunication
News Release from: Butler Group | Subject: Document collaboration report
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 17 January 2007
Document collaboration inefficiencies
waste time
Organisations that cannot manage the production of documents effectively and efficiently risk a great deal more than poor business performance.
A new report, just published by Butler Group, Europe's leading IT research and advisory organisation argues that employees spend up to 25% of their working day on non-productive, document collaboration related tasks The report, 'Document Collaboration', goes on to say that organisations risk a great deal more than poor business performance by not managing the production of their high value business documents, and that the time has come for Document Collaboration to move on from simple intra-company collaborative exchanges to more sophisticated inter-company collaborative experiences
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 13 Oct 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
Related stories
Key Technologies for Achieving IT Flexibility
Organisations must focus on their SOA efforts if they are to benefit from greater flexibility
10% of salary bill wasted looking for information
A new report argues that many organisations are frittering away up to 10% of their staff costs on wasted effort because employees simply can't find the right information to do their jobs.
"Organisations are now looking to extend the reach and range of their Document Collaboration capabilities in order to support high-value, low-overhead joint ventures and collaborative commercial undertakings", says Richard Edwards, Senior Research Analyst at Butler Group and co-author of the report.
"However, technology issues, business constraints, and information formats combine to make the job of Document Collaboration a much more arduous one than it should be".
Butler Group maintains that the business value of any collaborative endeavour is embodied within the business value of the end-product.
Further reading
Green IT is no longer an option: it's a necessity
IT Has A Terawatt appetite - 'Green IT' should be a topic of discussion for all senior executives
More strides towards green computing
Organisations are just beginning to recognise that being seen as 'green' is good for business
Governance issues beyond IT
Governance requirements must be tailored to different aspects of IT spend
"In the ultra-competitive 'new world of work', Document Collaboration tools and technologies must support, encourage, and facilitate high-value interactions in a manner that ensures information confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility".
says Sue Clarke, the report's co-author and Senior Research Analyst at Butler Group.
"Documents, in whatever format they may exist, are an integral part of every business and institution, and organisations that cannot manage the production of documents effectively and efficiently risk a great deal more than poor business performance".
says Sarah Burnett, Senior Research Analyst at Butler Group and the report's third co-author.
"Organisations cannot exist without documents, and therefore the efficacy with which documents are created, revised, and published should be of utmost importance to business managers".
Business managers continue to seek out new means by which that most expensive of all human corporate resources - i.e the information worker - can become more efficient, effective, and productive.
At the start of the decade, corporate IT managers were focusing on internal corporate collaboration solutions, content management, and Web conferencing products, and as a result the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) market sprang forth.
Today, however, senior managers are looking for ways to reduce the excessive cost and complexity of high-level business interactions, and those scenarios relating to Document Collaboration in particular.
Butler Group estimates the size of the global Document Collaboration segment of the ECM market to be US$586 million in 2007.
There are many overlapping technologies within the Content Management market that address the collaborative document production process, and based on figures produced by parent company Datamonitor, Butler Group estimates that the global market for Document Collaboration solutions will be worth nearly US$800 million by the end of 2010.
The analysis presented within Butler Group's report suggests that this is still an immature sector of the software industry, and that new entrants to the market are very likely over the next 12 months.
For this very reason, the report contains profiles of over 20 vendors offering ancillary products, technologies, and services relevant to this topic.
Whilst competition to dominate the collaboration market intensifies amongst large players such as Microsoft and the ECM vendors, Butler Group believes that disruptive solutions based on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) functionality and new Web-based technologies will force both vendors and organisations to re-think their strategies over the coming year.
Sarah Burnett sums-up Butler Group's view by saying, "Document Collaboration functionality will continue to be componentised over the next 24 months, allowing easy integration with Line-Of-Business systems and Enterprise Applications".
"In the meantime, however, more standards will emerge to improve collaboration functionality amongst products".
• Butler Group: contact details and other news
• Email this article to a colleague
• Register for the free Manufacturingtalk email newsletter
• Manufacturingtalk Home Page
Search the Pro-Talk network of sites
