Untapped asset : The $3 Trillion value of US Enterprise documents

Conclusion (in case you felt it was tl;dr): The value of documents – in their creation, access and use – can indeed be measured

The information contained within U.S. enterprise documents represents about a third of gross domestic product, or an amount of about $3.3 trillion annually

Some 25% of all of these expenditures lend themselves to actionable improvements

There are perhaps on the order of 10 billion documents created annually in the U.S.

Corporate data doubles every six to eight months; 85% of this data is contained in documents

Ninety to 97 percent of enterprises cannot estimate how much they spend on producing documents each year

Document creation is about 2-3 times more important – from an embedded cost standpoint – than document handling

It costs, on average, $350 to create a ‘typical’ document The total potential benefit from practical improvements in document access and use to the U.S economy is on the order of $800 billion annually, or about 8% of GDP

For the 1,000 largest U.S. firms, benefits from these improvements can approach nearly $250 million annually per firm

About three-quarters of these benefits arise from not re-creating the intellectual capital already invested in prior document creation

Another 25% of the benefits are due to reduced regulatory non-compliance or paperwork, or better competitiveness in obtaining solicited contracts and grants

$33 billion is wasted each year in re-finding previously found Web documents

Paperwork and regulatory improvements due to documents can save U.S. enterprises $120 billion each year

Lack of document access due to Web sprawl costs U.S. enterprises $22 billion each year

$8 billion in annual benefits is available due to document improvements for competitive governmental grant and contract solicitations

These figures likely severely underestimate the benefits to enterprises from improved competitiveness, a factor not analyzed in this study

Documents are now at the point where structured data was at 15 years ago at the nascent emergence of the data warehousing market.

Seems like a good opportunity for a start up. If funny b/c at work I'm working on a project to bring all of our information into a search index.

The state of document management at large companies really is pretty abysmal, and many haven't made much in the way of a serious effort to digitize stuff. My dad, retired from a large petrochemical company, still occasionally gets calls from current engineers there asking if he happens to have any documentation of projects he worked on years ago, and in a lot of cases his personal files seem more complete than the company's, which have been hopelessly shuffled and/or lost over the course of several mergers and moves.

An alternate title for this document: "The economic toll of the Microsoft Office monopoly."

are we talking getting documents from paper => digital or are we talking doing something with the data in digital documents?

Isn't docs.google.com (now with uploads) is the solution? =))