Why is ECM strategy important for all Enterprises?

Welcome to the new enterprise, Enterprise 2.0. Knowledge workers in today's enterprises create unstructured content during every step of the business process. Unstructured content is the daily email, chat, IM, documents, images, web-content, blogs, tweets,  power point presentations, videos, music and several other files  that are constantly created and stored on PC's, mobile devices and e-readers. Surveys conducted across enterprises project the unstructured content to be the most difficult to manage and the fastest growing data point within an organization. The value of the information in the content directly impacts revenues, process efficiencies(cost saves), legal and compliance and in almost all cases delivers business benefit. This creates several challenging problems for the enterprise which leads to several questions - how can this content be managed? how can the content be processed to extract meaningful information to help the business? what is the business impact if the content is lost / destroyed? what is the cost to store the content on the PC's and mobile devices long term? Every CIO and IT department in Enterprises have to answer these questions in the age of Enterprise 2.0. This leads directly to the topic of our discussion on "Why is ECM strategy important for all Enterprises?". ECM is the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM covers the management of information within the entire scope of an enterprise whether that information is in the form of a paper document, an electronic file, a database print stream, or even an email. Thus as you can infer from the very definition of ECM, it's needed for Enterprise 2.0 to deliver innovation, create smart business processes through workflow optimization and protect the organization through the legal discovery process in addition to delivering collaboration in an Enterprise. Only 10% of the enterprises across the globe have an active ECM strategy. The main barrier for ECM deployment in an organization was cost followed by a lengthy ROI. With the emergence of quality open source/open standards products, the entry costs have dramatically reduced by 70-0% in most cases. Enterprises and government's should look at open source ECM as an alternative to become adopters of this enabling technology.