Apply 3 Rs for better information management

The following is a guest article by Jeff Mills, Managing Director of Xenos Europe.

Reduce, reuse, recycle is the green mantra that gained a lot of currency in the 1980s. Today, a large number of enterprises are aggressively pursuing 3R policies, covering everything from paper usage and disposal practices to energy usage and water consumption.

As Green IT moves from the notion of a paperless office into a mainstream corporate social responsibility, businesses are now also identifying ways in which to minimise the corporate carbon footprint and at the same time achieve their strategic business objectives.

There is, however, one other area that demands equal consideration by organisations: managing structured and unstructured data and documents. Very often enterprises will hold the same information in a variety of different electronic formats and in different physical locations to meet different requirements. Multiple silos of information in technologically incompatible systems mean that information cannot be shared in real time. In addition, this approach consumes inordinate amounts of storage space and the associated costs that go with that.

With the explosive growth in data and documents, the time has come to apply reduce, reuse and recycle thinking to electronic business information. Embracing a more strategic, ‘green; approach to information management will deliver a number of benefits, not the least of which is a dramatic reduction in the cost and complexity of power-consuming storage requirements. There are a number of specific offerings that can help to reduce storage demands by eliminating redundancy and simplifying access to business critical information in real time. These include archiving, content migration and consolidation tools that enable real-time, on-demand transformation of customer statements and other key documents contained in electronic print files to PDFs for ePresentment.

Xenos, for example, has developed some innovative approaches to the storage challenges facing enterprises today. By eliminating the constraints imposed by incompatible hardware or software platforms and disparate data and document archives, we have helped organisations to reduce, reuse and recycle their data and documents to lower costs and improve information flow.

On-demand transformation to PDF format allows organisations to eliminate the unnecessary storage of large, graphically rich files, while streamlining version control with a technique known as “document resource optimisation.” For some, this approach has effectively reduced storage requirements by as much as 90 percent. Given that many large enterprises are spending as much as 70 percent of their IT budgets on their storage infrastructures, it’s time to apply reduce, reuse, and recycle thinking to data and storage needs.

Jeff Mills is responsible for implementing the strategic plan for Xenos throughout Europe, Middle East and Africa. He joined Xenos in 1998 as a technical consultant and held a variety of key positions before being appointed as EMEA Managing Director in 2004. He has more than 20 years of experience in the document and data industry, and a strong background in software application development. He can be reached at jmills@xenos.com. More information on Xenos can be found at www.xenos.com.