Gartners EMC Magic Quadrant 2007

Lazy end of the week post :-) Just a link in fact to my post today on CMS Watch regarding the MQ...

http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/1023-De-mystifying-the-Gartner-ECM-Magic-Quadrant

Culling Content

It's long been a gripe of mine that ECM systems were designed to reduce the amount of content you needed to manage to essentials. Yet instead they often just manage everything - trash along with diamonds.

It's really not that hard to reduce the volumes of content you manage dramatically - a simple content audit can clear out 70-80% without in anyway impacting your RM policies or frankly even being noticable to the end users. Most everything sitting there anyway is a duplication, is redundant or should never have been there in the first place.

Why bring this old gripe up now ? Well I have spent the past week emersed in the world of eDiscovery. And in some regards that is what eDiscovery is all about - filtering down from the mass to the essentials. It's a big topic in it's own right, and soon an online training course will be launched by AIIM based on the work we have been doing. Thing is, how come all these great filtering technologies (along with long standing de-dupe technology) is virtually never used in the world of ECM? Surely, ongoing culling of redundant information should be a part of your ongoing information management policy!