By Vanilda Grando, Managing Director, Americas Region, Kodak Alaris Information Management
In the era of data chaos, organizations are faced with a near-constant influx of paper and digital documents that threaten employee productivity. IDC predicts digital data will exceed 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020 with 90 percent of that growth in the form of unstructured data. An inability to harness this data — to turn it into information that can drive an organization’s processes and actions — leads to complexity and lost opportunity.
With the exponential growth of data that arrives in various formats and from multiple sources, organizations must find new and innovative ways to take the complexity out of information capture. In a survey conducted by Pricewaterhouse Coopers and Iron Mountain, 43 percent of companies surveyed said they “obtain little tangible benefit from their information,” while 23 percent “derive no benefit whatsoever.” Today, data chaos is most rampant at the threshold between physical and digital documents. This creates five key challenge areas where organizations can benefit from working with a solutions provider:
Within these challenges lies an opportunity to drive growth and efficiency at every level of an organization. Companies that successfully transform data chaos into usable information will enhance their business processes and differentiate themselves from competitors. The question for most organizations is not whether to embrace digital transformation, but where and how to begin.
The scale and complexity of data today requires an integrated, ecosystem approach to help organizations capture, process, and share information. From a robust set of hardware and software to a strong network of partners that can deliver customized solutions, each element must integrate with each other to seamlessly work together. Every business has unique information capture needs, and it can be complicated to turn documents into information. With an ecosystem approach, organizations can attack data chaos head on, meeting the many challenges of a digital world to truly transform the flood of documents and information into a powerful competitive advantage.