For the past couple of years, there has been a rising trend within successful businesses that’s helping them become more effective, work more efficiently, and develop a more complete understanding of where their workflow is doing what they want for them and where they could make improvements— that trend is the still-developing idea of content analytics.
For the uninitiated and those who simply might need a refresher, content analytics is essentially the concept of applying an overarching collection of all the content that your business deals in, as well as the way your employees interact with that content, and analyzing that information in order to improve decision making, practices and processes in order to move your company forward. It’s become a popular and extremely effective way for companies to take an organize look at the areas where their efficiency lags in some key areas which we’ll address later in this article.
That’s the basic definition of content analysis, but in order to have a more complete understanding we should delve a bit deeper into the elements of content analysis, which takes a look at two primary “types” of content within your company— unstructured data and structured data.
Structured Data
Structured data is essentially any content that your company collects and archives in a unified database, whether a document management system (DMS), an enterprise content management (ECM) system, or some other digital database. This might include payroll documents, HR information, company regulations and guidelines, tax information, and other types of official stored documentation. If your company’s data is a meal, the structured data is the main course. This is where much of the meat of your company’s identity is stored.
Unstructured Data
Unstructured data is basically the rest of the content that your company deals with, and it isn’t strictly documents. From emails and messages to videos, audio recordings, images and virtual courses, the definition of unstructured data is extremely inclusive of many various types of content within your company. While content analysis can be applied to unstructured data, it can be more difficult to make sense of the findings of a content analysis applied to this data.
Common Results of Content Analysis
When businesses apply content analysis to their companies, what they often find is that the way they interact with the content that their company deals in is not as efficient as it could be. One of the inefficiencies that frequently comes to light as a result of content analysis is content duplication.
Content Duplication
Whether in paper documents or online, several versions of identical documents are saved at the same time, taking up either physical or virtual real estate and costing unnecessary storage fees. One effective way to streamline content de-duplication is by utilizing a powerful DMS system like eFileCabinet. A DMS can create an organized digital database for storing content that can be easily called upon and, where necessary, deleted in the case of duplicates.
Content Analysis, DMS and ECM
So how else does the power of content analysis intersect with document management and enterprise content management? How will the ever-increasing use of content analysis affect perceptions of DMS and ECM? Essentially these analyses will reveal the power and effectiveness of using a content management or enterprise content management system within your organization to maximize efficiency. Between paper document and digital files, it’s alarmingly easy for businesses to find themselves disorganized and inefficient in handling their content. That’s where a robust DMS can make an incredible difference.
In many ways, content analysis and document management share common uses for businesses and are implemented to achieve common goals. For example, content analysis reveals instances of data duplication within an organization’s content database, while DMS utilize advanced functions to ensure that duplication is kept at a minimum.
Additionally, both content analysis and document management systems are designed to streamline the efficiency of an organizations content management. To use another food analogy, imagine content analysis to be the detailed shopping list that tells you the ingredients you need to create a perfect recipe of corporate efficiency. A document management system offers the ingredients necessary to cook up some dramatically positive transformations in effectiveness.
Conclusion
As content analysis becomes more robust and advanced, so too will the methods used by businesses to use the results of that analysis to transform their company for the better. The time is now to discover how the powerful combination of content analysis and document management or enterprise content management can help your business take daily, measurable steps to eliminating time and money-wasting practices and maximize profitability and work effectiveness.
To find out more about content analysis and document management, fill out the form on this page to receive your free 15-minute demo of eFileCabinet’s document management system.