ECM for greener IT?

Guess what? An effective, enterprise-wide content management strategy can make your organisation more agile, efficient and save you significant energy costs. Yes, you might already be aware of this fact, as it's fairly obvious that ditching paper, printers and copiers in favour of digital content is going to generate significant benefits for the company. But a new Gartner report seeks to shed a little more light on the specific processes you'll need to identify, which can then be improved to increase efficiency and reduce greenhouse emissions.
Now the green debate has been rumbling along for some time now, and it's probably not exactly at the top of your agenda, in fact it's unlikely it'll ever move out of the 'nice-to-have' category. But it will have to be taken seriously eventually, especially if various stakeholders start to demand to see your green credentials.
That said though, especially in these trying economic times, the biggest benefits of reviewing your content management strategy and going fully digital are the economic and efficiency gains. So what does Enterprise Content Management Strategies for Green IT actually recommend? Well, put simply it is to examine all areas of the business that currently require paper, ranging from the hardware such as printers and copiers, and the business processes which are paper-intensive.
What you should do next, according to report author Mark Gilbert, is look at how paper could be reduced in these areas, rank each project in order of how much impact they're likely to have on the business, then prioritise the most achievable and set a timeline. Simple.
Well, probably not very simple actually, but by looking for example at electronic storage of documents, this could save on the energy associated with paper manufacture and distribution, and that required to air condition large paper-storage environments. Then there are the efficiency gains to be had by, for example, switching to e-forms for the capture of electronic data.
I guess firms should be thinking of these projects not just as moving from one format to another - paper to digital - but of transitioning their processes. As Gilbert tod me, data has little value unless it's part of a process, and I would add that when this data is managed electronically it can be much more versatile, it can be used in a much nimbler way than if residing on a piece of paper. As he said: "We want to keep the people on the [digital] highway; not accomodating off-ramps to other mediums."