Are document-based tasks a big waste?

London-based Butler Group claims employees spend up to 25 percent of the day on nonproductive document tasks. “Documents are integral to every business, and any organization that cannot effectively manage their production risks a great deal more than poor business performance,” says Sarah Burnett, senior research analyst.

Based on increasing levels of Web-based collaboration, corporate IT managers now see enterprise content management (ECM) as an important issue. Butler estimates the global document collaboration segment of the ECM market to be $586 million in 2007. There are many overlapping technologies within the content management market that address the collaborative document production process. According to Butler, while Microsoft looks set to do battle with ECM vendors to become the document collaboration provider of choice, peer-to-peer functionality and new Web-based technologies will soon force both Microsoft and best-of-breed ECM vendors to rethink their strategies.