The Big Data Problem that is Choking Your Productivity

According to the Gartner Group, the largest single source of waste in handling data is unstructured files stored by your staff on servers, their PC’s, DropBox, GoogleDocs, and OneDrive.

This data is the fastest growing of all of your data sources. For example, across our customers, we generally find that their entire production, financial and production data stores, to average 50-100 GB.  However, it is common for a single employee who’s been working with a company for more than a couple of years to have several hundred Gigabytes of data, mostly unstructured.

This clutter is the big data problem that is choking your productivity.

Unstructured data’s biggest sources are:

• Duplicate copies of everything, just in case.
• Videos of vendor presentations.
• Duplicates of commonly used forms like contracts, expense forms, etc.
• Unedited pictures taken for all sorts of reasons.
• Multiple stores of marketing collateral.
• Personal music, videos, and pictures downloaded from smartphones.

The second largest source of unstructured data is the stuff no one wants to throw out. Just like the storerooms of paper you used to have. The problem here is that it is much harder to see and feels cheap to just keep it.

But all this costs lots of money. Company money.

How? Aren’t storage costs low? Yes – storage space is approaching free. A megabyte of storage, 30 years ago could cost $1,000. It now costs less than 1/1000 of a cent.

The cost is in the time it takes employees to wade through all this data every time they want to find something. Watch them.

One test we recently ran showed employees average navigation to be 11 folders deep. In other words, looking for a work order could take several minutes, each time!

We have new tools and methodologies that will help you get a handle on your unstructured data and stop wasting time and money. Please contact us today!