Content Management Problem? That May Be A Good SignContent Management Problem? That May Be A Good Sign

Collaboration has such a lovely "let 1,000 flowers bloom" ring to it. IT teams know it means pulling a lot of weeds, too, but it sure beats the alternative.

Chris Murphy, Editor, information

December 15, 2008

1 Min Read
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Collaboration has such a lovely "let 1,000 flowers bloom" ring to it. IT teams know it means pulling a lot of weeds, too, but it sure beats the alternative.At Pfizer, it means tending the 6,000 Microsoft SharePoint sites used by 63,000 employees -- all of which have sprouted in just over a year. It's one of several examples in the current information cover story that argues that the explosive growth of unstructured content requires a rethinking of enterprise content management strategies. The article describes how Pfizer's thinking about the challenge:

[Dave Biersach, associate director at Pfizer] takes the enterprise content management part of ECM seriously. Pfizer has about 1.5 TBs of SharePoint content in its SANs, and he expects to have about 6 TBs in two years. But he's determined not to let SharePoint become an information landfill. "If three years from now we see 15 TBs, that would indicate a loss of governance."

Having this problem should be a point of pride for IT teams. SharePoint is growing like kudzu in Georgia for a reason -- given the chance, people crave the collaboration and control SharePoint and other tools like it allow. IT teams need to answer that kind of demand.

Yes, it's creating a runaway bloom of unstructured content that IT teams need to figure out how to manage. Better that than a company where there's no place for this kind of collaboration to even take root.

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About the Author

Chris Murphy

Editor, information

Chris Murphy is editor of information and co-chair of the information Conference. He has been covering technology leadership and CIO strategy issues for information since 1999. Before that, he was editor of the Budapest Business Journal, a business newspaper in Hungary; and a daily newspaper reporter in Michigan, where he covered everything from crime to the car industry. Murphy studied economics and journalism at Michigan State University, has an M.B.A. from the University of Virginia, and has passed the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exams.

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