A BRIGHTPLANET WHITE PAPER

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BrightPlanet Corporation
Released: July 2005

Executive Summary Abstract

Today, in the advanced knowledge economy of the United States, the value of the information contained within documents created each year represents about a third of total gross domestic product, or an amount of about $3.3 trillion 1 annually.

Yet our understanding of the value of documents and the means to manage them is abysmal. These failures impact enterprises of all sizes from the standpoints of revenues, profitability and reputation. Continued national productivity growth —and thus the wealth of all citizens — depends critically on understanding and managing these document values.

Key Findings

Some 25% of all of the annual trillions of dollar spent on document creation costs lend themselves to actionable improvements:

Table 1. Mid-range Estimates for the Annual Value of Documents, U.S. Firms, 2002  

The total benefit from improved 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 millionannually per firm. About three-quarters of these benefits arise from not recreating the intellectual capital already invested in prior document creation. About one-quarter of the benefits are due to reduced regulatory non-compliance or paperwork, or better competitiveness in obtaining solicited grants and contracts.

Indeed, even these figures likely severely underestimate the benefits to enterprises from an improved leverage of document assets. It has always been the case that the best and most successful companies have been able to make better advantage of their intellectual assets than their competitors. The competitiveness advantage from better document access and use alone may exceed the huge benefits in the table above.

Documents — that is, unstructured and semi-structured data — are now at the point where structured data was at 15 years ago. At that time, companies realized that consolidating information from multiple numeric databases would be a key source of competitive advantage. That realization led to the development and growth of the data warehousing or business intelligence markets, now representing about $3.9 billion in annual software sales.

Search and enterprise content management software today only represents a fraction of that amount — perhaps on the order of $500 million annually. But given that intellectual content in documents represents three to four times the amount in numeric structured data, it is clear that document software capabilities are not being well utilized, reaching only a small fraction of their market potential.