Paper is still holding a majority of organizations information and excessive use of paper is adversely effecting the environment with the destruction of trees, which is the most wonderful natural resource resulting in global warming and posing threat to future generations. Organizations today have realized the importance of managing their content efficiently to safeguard their bottom-line and environment. Managing unstructured content, which constitutes 80% of the content generated is more challenging and needs better management. The advancement of IT has helped in mitigating these challenges in different ways and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions have witnessed their clear leadership in this. This presentation will focus on defining what is Green Content, explaining the adverse impact of paper usage on Environment and suggesting how Enterprise Content Management (ECM) can help organizations in their green initiatives.

1. Green Content
- ECM an enabler
Author : Co-Author :
K.V. Rajesh Manish Soota
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2. Introduction
Content is generated in every walk of our life in different forms like
paper, faxes, eMails, social networks, forms, web pages, audio,
video and in many other forms. The exponential growth of content is
witnessed every year and is bringing several challenges to the
organizations and environment.
Paper is still holding a majority of organizations information and
excessive use of paper is adversely effecting the environment with
the destruction of trees, which is the most wonderful natural resource
resulting in global warming and posing threat to future generations.
Organizations today have realized the importance of managing their
content efficiently to safeguard their bottom-line and environment.
Managing unstructured content, which constitutes 80% of the content
generated is more challenging and needs better management.
The advancement of IT has helped in mitigating these challenges in
different ways and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions
have witnessed their clear leadership in this.
This presentation will focus on defining what is Green Content,
explaining the adverse impact of paper usage on Environment and
ECM can help organizations in their green initiatives.
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3. What is unstructured
content?
Unstructured content includes paper documents, eMails, word
documents, images, web pages, audios, videos and many other
content types which reside outside the scope of structured
databases. Since they don’t follow a structure it is very difficult to
manage this type of content.
Fig 1 : Unstructured Content
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Note : Respective Trademarks belong to Facebook, Tweeter, Adobe, AutoCad and Microsoft.

4. What is unstructured
content?
• Majority of potentially usable business information originates in
unstructured form
• Unstructured data is growing at 61.7% CAGR while structured
content is growing at 21.8%
• By 2013, 507 Billion emails will be sent each day
• 4.6 Billon Mobile Phones World Wide
• Twitter process 7 terabytes of data every day
• Facebook process 10 terabytes of data every day
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5. What is green content?
The unstructured content which is in electronic form and if managed
properly will use less paper, printers, faxes, photocopiers,
transportation and physical storage in its lifecycle can be termed as
green content. Green content helps the environment on a
sustainable basis with minimal carbon footprint.
Fig 2 : Be eco-friendly with green content
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6. How is Paper Impacting
our Environment
Paper is an essential stationary in every office and 95% of business
information is still stored on paper. We have been hearing the term
“paperless office” for many years now but paper consumption has
tripled in the last decade. The advancement of IT has not reduced
our paper use; instead, we print more and copy more adding to the
paper pile. An estimated 115 billion sheets of paper are used
annually for personal computers. Traditionally record keeping
constitutes more than 90% of all office activity. Studies indicate that
80% of paper filed is never referenced again. A great deal of time is
being wasted printing, sorting, purging, and filing paper. Paper
intensive processes are highly inefficient, increases processing time
and prone to loss of information during the process. Though
paperless office is a still a myth but there is a clear environmental
need for it.
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Fig 3 : Deforestation, air and water pollution for paper manufacturing

7. How is Paper Impacting
our Environment
Not just the consumption of trees for paper production is causing
environmental problems, even the paper making process is
hazardous to the environment. Paper mills are one of the worst
polluters to air, water and land. Each year millions of pounds of
highly toxic chemicals such as toluene, methanol, chlorine dioxide,
hydrochloric acid and formaldehyde are released into the air and
water from papermaking plants around the world.
• It takes one 15-year old tree to produce half a box of paper
• Approximately 324 liters of water is used to produce 1 KG of paper
• Paper manufacturing is the largest industrial user of water per
pound of finished product
• Paper manufacturing is the 3rd largest user of fossil fuels worldwide
• One tree can filter up to 60 pounds of pollutants from the air each
year which is compromised for producing paper
• Rainforests once covered 14% of the earth's land surface; now they
cover a mere 6% and experts estimate that the last remaining
rainforests could be consumed in less than 40 years
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8. How is Paper Impacting
our Environment
• The US uses approximately 68 million trees each year to produce
17 billion catalogues and 65 billion pieces of direct mail.
• Every tree provides oxygen enough for 3 people to breathe.
• Paper products use about 35% of the world's annual commercial
wood harvest
• When paper rots or is composted it emits methane gas which is 25
times more toxic than CO2
Fig 4 : Global Warming – Impact of paper on Environment
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Courtesy : http://mairedubhtx.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/global-warming/,
http://idiotsandgenious.blogspot.com/2011/06/world-alert-global-warming-is-changing.html

9. What is ECM
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the strategies, methods
and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver
content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM
tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's
unstructured information, wherever that information exists. – by AIIM
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Fig 5 : Unified ECM Platform

10. What is ECM
ECM offers an unified platform for scanning & capture, document
management, search, workflow management, collaboration, web
content management, records management and digital asset
management. ECM technologies have matured over years and
widened their offerings. Several organizations across industries have
been benefited from ECM in optimizing their processes, enhancing
customer satisfaction, improving productivity, reducing cost,
increasing profitability and saving environment.
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11. How ECM enables
Green Content
ECM enables organizations to manage their unstructured content in
its entire lifecycle from creation, sharing, usage, archival till
destruction. Among all IT solutions ECM is a leading enabler of
Green Content by reducing organizations dependency on paper.
Many organizations worldwide have realized the importance of
Green Content and implemented ECM as an enabler. ECM has
several benefits to offer to organizations, but in this article we will
majorly focus on how ECM helps the environment with Green
Content by identifying key areas where paper usage is more.
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12. How ECM enables
1
Green Content
Through scanning paper documents and drawings are converted to
electronic files which can be easily shared with multiple users hence
reducing the need for taking copies and printouts for sharing &
processing the content. Paper should be scanned earliest at the
point of its origination to reduce or eliminate the need to physically
manage it in the process. For example a financial institution keeps a
copy of the customer document at the branch location and ships the
original to central / regional office where further processing takes
place. But if the branches scan the document as soon as they
receive it from the customer they can immediately share the scanned
images with their central / regional office and can save on taking
copy and shipping. In case of discrepancy in the document they are
sent back to branch office which in turn consumes fuel during
transpiration and increases the processing time.
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13. How ECM enables
2
Green Content
Knowledge workers have the habit of taking printout of draft letters /
documents for editing and taking approvals before the final
document is ready. In this process the document goes through
several iterations and are printed, copied and circulated several
times. ECM helps knowledge workers to collaborate while creating
a document allowing users to jointly work on different versions of the
document before the final one is created. At the same time ECM also
offers the traditional flexibility of highlighting, underlining, adding
annotations / comments even on the electronic documents.
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14. How ECM enables
3
Green Content
All organizations, irrespective of whether they are into Government &
Public Services or Financial Services or Insurance or power & utility
or Healthcare or manufacturing or engineering & construction or
educational or logistics or non-profit, all of them, have paper
intensive processes which are detrimental to the environment and
organizational bottom line. Some of the paper intensive processes
are Accounts Payable & Receivables process, Account Opening
Process, Employee records management, Contracts Management,
Drug Discovery, Citizen Services, Health care, Claims processes
and many more. Organizations should identify their respective paper
intensive processes and automate it with the help of ECM. The
Business Process Management and Workflow functionality of ECM
helps organizations in automating and optimizing their document
intensive processes by eliminating their dependency on paper
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15. How ECM enables
4
Green Content
Heaps of pre printed paper forms are distributed, stored and used in
key business processes. Application forms, purchase requisitions,
invoices, claims are some of the commonly used pre printed
stationeries. Managing pre printed stationary is a herculean task, if
not properly planned will result in wastage of the entire stock due to
change in structure / content of the form. Sometimes when an
organization goes through corporate identity change the entire pre
printed stationery is discarded. With eForms these pre printed
stationary can be completely eliminated and reduce its impact on
environment. At the same time eForms offer several advanced
features while capturing data with field level validations, calculations,
pre population and while logically routing the form effortlessly in the
process. After completion of the process eForms are stored in ECM
as records for future reference.
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16. How ECM enables
5
Green Content
In modern times eMails are extensively used and becoming de-facto
mode of business communication.
Fig 6 : Which of the above would best describe standard practice in your organization for dealing with “important” emails?
Source : State of the ECM Industry 2010, AIIM
Users have the ill practice of taking printout of eMails to file for future
reference and audit purposes. As shown in above figure, still 12%
admit taking printout of eMails for filing as paper. ECM with its eMail
Management functionality automates the process of capturing email
messages as business records, simplifies the retrieval of messages
for compliance purposes, and effectively solves email storage
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issues.

17. How ECM enables
6
Green Content
When paper documents are sent off-site for archiving, Gartner
estimates that only about 1 per cent is ever accessed again. As
much as possible organizations should store records electronically
and save on physical record keeping. When we store records
electronically we don’t print & copy them for storage and in turn
saves environment by reducing use of paper, electricity consumed in
heating or cooling the record room and fuel consumed in transporting
records. Destruction of paper records also generates polluting gases
and debris. Record retention policies are equally important since it
can reduce unnecessary storage of old records for ages. ECM
manages digital and physical records regardless of the system they
originate from or reside in throughout their entire lifecycle by
classifying, storing, securing and disposing the records with clearly
defined retention policies. This also helps in meeting regulatory
demands by safeguarding key records, confidential information and
intellectual property.
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18. Conclusion
Green Content initiatives have sustainable benefits to organizations
and society at large. Since we now understand the ill effects of paper
on the environment, each one of us should consciously reduce its
consumption and spread the message for a greener tomorrow.
Like any other major initiatives in an organization this should also be
driven from top with clear mandate at all levels. Knowing the
contribution of ECM towards Green Content, organizations should
strategically plan its rollout by identifying right ECM solution, build a
team which is committed to this initiative, find out where paper is
heavily used (which can otherwise be managed electronically) and
automate those paper intensive processes from its point of
origination.
Apart from significantly contributing to the environment, Green
Content also helps organizations in reducing cost, increasing
employee & customer satisfaction, increase profitability and
complying with statutory requirements.
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19. References
1.IDC Enterprise Disk Storage Consumption Model" report released
in Fall 2009
2.Email Statistics Report, 2009-2013 by The Radicati Group, INC
3.IBM ParterWorld Leadership Conference February 2011
4.iD2comminications : Facts About Paper and Paper Waste, Source :
Worldwatch Institute; Environment Canada; American Forest and Paper Association, (Garner, J.W.. Energy
Conservation Practices Offer Environmental and Cost Benefits. Pulp & Paper, October 2002); "1996
Statistics, Data Through 1995." American Forest and Paper Association. November 1996; American Forest
and Paper Association; North Carolina Office of Waste Reduction and Recycling; The Recycler's Handbook,
1990; International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED)
5.http://www.aiim.org/What-is-ECM-Enterprise-Content-Management
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