For most organizations, information chaos - what happens when large amounts of unstructured content hamper their ability to effectively manage and control data - is the rule rather than the exception these days.

According to AIIM's recent "State of the ECM Industry 2007" study, most organizations realize they have a problem with effectively managing information. In fact, the research found that 33 percent of respondents rated their information management practices as poor. On average, they gave their organizations a 5.43 rating on a 10-point scale.

Most experts agree that enterprise content management (ECM) can help organizations beef up their information management processes. In the survey of more than 1,200 end users from more than 50 countries, AIIM also looked at four classes of user experience with ECM: 1) No ECM experience; 2) tactical or departmental; 3) transitional (moving to integrate across departments); and 4) strategic. The survey found the organizational impact of ECM to be significant across this continuum.

Key findings include:

* Organizations with a strategic approach to ECM are five times more likely to be more effective in managing electronic information than those with no document or records investment.

* The cycle time to produce information in response to a discovery request is significantly less for organizations with a strategic approach to ECM; 46 percent of strategic end users indicate they could produce all the relevant information related to a former customer within one week - versus 29 percent at organizations with no ECM experience.

* Most importantly, when asked to evaluate their organization's profitability relative to competitors, 57 percent of users with a strategic approach to ECM said their organizations are "more" or "much more" profitable than their competitors. This is 46 percent higher than the response for those with only tactical ECM experience.

"It is clear that document and records management technologies have moved from the department to the enterprise," said John F. Mancini, AIIM president. "Our survey found that as end users shift from a tactical to a strategic approach to ECM implementation, the benefits of the implementation scale and the productivity of employees rises. In fact, overall organizational profitability and effectiveness increases as ECM becomes a strategic priority."