Are enterprises getting the most out of their data?

Praveen Kumar, Vice President for Asia Pacific, Rocket Software, says content management software raises agility and resilience in data utilization. 

Data is the new oil in the age of Digital Transformation and companies with underutilized data are fuel-inefficient cars of the past.

Many business leaders recognize data as their company’s most valuable asset, but not all have the processes and tools to unlock their full potential.

In Rocket Software’s Content Management: The Movement to Modernization survey last year, 81% of respondents indicated that at least some of their enterprise data was retrieved, processed and stored but never used.

Organizations that have not improved their data management processes to account for non-traditional records and other unstructured data face risks such as non-compliance with data governance regulations and missing opportunities to be competitive. 

With the migration to cloud systems, many businesses have been able to ease the challenges of remote and hybrid work during the pandemic. 

According to a PWC survey, 72% of Singaporean respondents preferred a mix of remote and in-person work, while 74% believe they will continue with hybrid work arrangements this year. 

While employee productivity has been taken to the next level, this has also led to more employees storing valuable business content on shared and personal external hard drives. 

Data sprawl – where valuable business content is scattered and hard to track – has consequently increased. For 37% of IT professionals we spoke to, this phenomenon is the biggest challenge when it comes to content management. 

Left unchecked, unstructured and unmanaged, data will inevitably affect productivity and a company’s overall success.

 Scattering of data also contributes to the increase in redundant, obsolete or trivial (ROT) data within enterprise systems. More than a third of the Rocket Software survey respondents believe ROT is the greatest threat to their data management efforts. 

The difficulty in properly locating, processing and removing excess or unnecessary data has led to higher operational costs and the increased risk of data corruption and non-compliance with regulations. 

IT teams need the visibility and resources of cloud technologies to eliminate data sprawl and ROT, which is critical to supporting diverse applications and rich content lifecycles. 

With the explosive growth in unstructured data, organizations need help to keep up – 59% of IT respondents believe their company’s unstructured data is either ‘extremely significant’ or very significant’.

This represents a loss in potential value unless businesses can process all of this information into utilizable content.

One way businesses can address this is by introducing integrative content tools into operations. Integrating content software with popular collaboration and communication tools, such as Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, gives content teams complete visibility of all their company data from a single platform. In this way, data professionals easily monitor, process, store and remove company data – resulting in their organizations getting the most out of their unstructured data.

The introduction of complex data privacy regulations globally has made data governance more challenging. Aside from Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act, locally based companies must also comply with the policies and legislation of other countries, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), when collecting data from overseas.

With only 33% of surveyed IT professionals confident that their organizations’ unstructured data is adequately governed, there is a real risk of businesses committing regulatory infractions while suffering from substantial fines and potential criminal prosecution. 

Many IT professionals are pushing for automated data governance processes, with over three-quarters believing their company would gain a significant competitive advantage if information security and compliance operations were automated.

Even enterprises with significant investments in mainframe technologies can also automate their information security and compliance operations. Through the right combination of content modernization solutions, IT teams can leverage the power of automation and innovative practices to content operations, regardless of infrastructure. 

While outdated processes and a lack of automation continue to hinder content management efforts, businesses are ostensibly making changes. 

Rocket Software’s survey found that around a third of IT professionals say that modernization efforts will ramp up, such as the introduction of integrative content software, over the next 18 months.

Organizations can keep up by implementing solutions that govern and leverage all of their content. Through content management software, organizations gain complete visibility, which boosts data utilization, raising agility and resilience.