Content Migration in the age of the Digital Hoarder

'Hoarders' is a(nother loathsome) reality show about unfortunate souls who, for a variety of tragic reasons, find themselves dangerously trapped in homes packed to the rafters with clutter. Imagine the challenge of removing the waste and properly organizing the remaining important stuff.

It's an easy parallel to the typical work environment where our desks may be clean but our digital detritus accumulates and proliferates at an incredible pace. A customer recently shared that they had at least 18 copies of any one file. Another project of nearly 1 million documents showed a 30+% duplication rate. Duplicates! Never mind the other content that was deemed Obsolete or Trivial. Migrating unstructured digital content is a common requirement. Whether you are centralizing repositories, moving content to a new geography, inheriting new mountains of valuable (?) IP from a recent merger or acquisition - the flow of content is an ongoing challenge and opportunity.

Just like the hoarders from the TV show who need to organize the important stuff - family photos and valuables, businesses dealing with content migration need to understand what is in the Digital Landfill to ensure the records they are migrating are the right ones. In addition to finding the right content, much of it needs to be properly analyzed, grouped and enriched to maximize its long-term usability, findability and value. There are real financial or corporate risks of not doing this properly. Dealing with it manually is expensive, risk prone and - under growing volumes - not sustainable.

Imagine if hoarders could wave a wand and have the garbage disappear, duplicates eliminated and high value content found, cleaned up, labelled and automatically stored in the ideal location. Impossible for table lamps and dishes but a reality for the masses of digital content that is migrating into and through your organization. A wise man once said:

 'You can't control, secure and leverage what you don't know you have'

Automation and increasingly intelligent technology are finally presenting a viable option to not only getting an understanding of what content you have (standardization) but also in cleaning it up (deduplication), extracting maximum value from it (auto-attribution) and more.

It takes more than just technology of course. You need help first to recognize the full scope of your problem. Then you need help to design and implement the process and system to perform this magic. Much like the hoarders on TV get help from experts, Adlib and its partners can provide the insight and guidance you need to take full advantage of the latest innovations around mastering your unstructured content.