Templafy survey finds  that over half of respondent organizations lack secure, system-wide content alignment despite relying on content for business success.

NEW YORK, June 8, 2022

New research from Templafy, the next gen document generation platform pioneering the content enablement space, shows that today’s enterprises are suffering from a lack of content infrastructure, putting their business success and reputation at constant risk.

Templafy’s Content is Everything global research report was conducted in the US, UK, Australia, and Germany surveying 2,296 full-time employees at enterprise-level companies. The report aims to determine the structural and financial consequences enterprises face when they lack automated, integrated technology solutions that support and connect content throughout employee workflows – and the US findings specifically uncover cause for concern.

The role of content in the digital HQ 

Content is – and always has been – a critical business asset. But in an increasingly digital-first work environment, now known as the “digital HQ,” content is a business’s direct bridge to its stakeholders, particularly customers and employees. In fact, 84% of survey respondents agreed that content is the most important driver of business success, while nearly all (97%) said content is essential to their organization’s financial wellbeing. 

As the role of content evolves, so does the definition of content itself. While the majority of respondents agreed they consider marketing materials and legal and financial documents to be content, many also agreed that productivity assets (35%) and classification and metadata (32%) are now considered business content as well. That means businesses need to be thinking about and managing content more holistically across their organization – everything from emails to pitch decks and the content components comprising them like metadata must be governed in some way, otherwise, they may face ramifications throughout the entire business. 

Enterprises’ content creation problem 

Managing content has proven to be no small feat: despite acknowledging content’s integral role in business success, companies are not prioritizing content infrastructure. Over half (61%) of respondents said their company struggles with content standardization and added that when creating new materials they are not confident they are using the latest company-approved assets. This lack of consistency and integrity across all business content is called “content anarchy,” and it’s a $25 million problem. 

Poor document governance and a lack of content infrastructure cause enterprises to lose thousands of employee hours per year. Templafy’s report found the average employee spends 15 hours per week creating content, and 67% said their company’s process for reviewing and approving content delays other work. To put that into context, at a 1,000 person company, this is 15,000 hours lost per week and over 700,000 hours lost per year. This wasted time leads to lost revenue, with over a third (34%) of respondents reporting they believe their company could increase its revenue by more than 50% if content bottlenecks were eliminated. 

To streamline content in the enterprise and eliminate bottlenecks, organizations need to ensure that contextualized content is being actively served to employees within the places they already work so it can actively support business processes. That way business documents consist of the right pieces of content like the latest logo or legal disclaimer. Without tech solutions to do this, organizations risk jeopardizing brand reputation, violating security requirements and losing out on content-associated revenue.  

Security is on the line 

Content anarchy and a lack of document governance pose significant security risks for today’s enterprises. 94% of respondents who work for companies that deal in sensitive client information indicated that having inconsistent, incorrect, or unreliable content shared externally can be detrimental to their business and cause security risks.

While 88% of respondents acknowledged security requirements are increasing and believe upholding strict requirements is more important than ever before, the scary truth is that over half of respondents also confessed their company has mistakenly shared a sensitive document with an unauthorized party. So, despite massive investments in security to prevent outside breaches, poor document governance remains a huge cause for security concerns. 

Why is this? 59% claim their company lacks secure, system-wide alignment when it comes to content, and 41% said their company urgently needs a better system to support mandatory document sensitivity classification. 

“Content is mission-critical to the success of any company, no matter the industry, size or location,” said Christian Lund, Co-Founder at Templafy. “Historically, static content solutions like enterprise content management (ECM) tools were enough for a company to get by, but in today’s digital HQ it’s simply not possible for users to navigate the exponentially growing amount of enterprise content and data anymore. More content is being created across a plethora of applications than ever before, and that content needs to drive value rather than introduce risk. Enterprises need a solution for these pain points, and we’re confident that content enablement technology is the key.” 

Additional key findings of the report include: 

• Metadata is introducing meta risk: 61% of respondents agreed a lack of control when it comes to metadata and classification poses a significant financial risk, while half of the respondents said the same for business and brand risk. Additional ramifications include damage to reputation (55%), legal fees (51%), legal ramifications (50%), loss of revenue (50%), and a loss of customer trust (45%). 
• Inaccurate content is proliferating through the sales org, hurting revenue: 82% of respondents said inaccurate or outdated information in content can harm sales, yet a whopping 70% said their team often pulls outdated information into sales pitches and content, including 87% who admit to using Google to search for company images or logos. 56% of respondents said they believe sales pitches and content make it to prospects with outdated information more than half the time. 
• Poor document governance hinders efficient, accurate brand scaling: 62% of respondents indicated their company struggles with backward compatibility, i.e. making sure that materials and templates in use are routinely updated with the latest information. This means that when enterprises update their branding, it is extremely difficult to ensure those updates are reflected across all existing collateral. 
• Automation is the answer: During the next 12 months, over half of respondents said their organization will prioritize document creation automation; 49% said their organization will prioritize content creation automation; and 48% said their organization will prioritize consolidation of software. 

To learn more about the Content Is Everything report and access the global findings, click here. 

Methodology

Templafy conducted the Content Is Everything report online between December 27, 2021, and January 3, 2022. It reflects the opinions of 601 individuals working full-time in the United States at global companies with over 1,000 employees. The survey was conducted at 95% confidence with a +/- 4% margin of error. 

About Templafy

Templafy’s next gen document generation platform automates all business document creation across organizations to activate and protect brands, drive governance and enable better document creation at any complexity and scale. We uniquely leverage content enablement technology that intelligently connects content to users where they already work, when it matters most. From immediate access to on-brand company templates directly within Microsoft Office, to fully automated compilation of a sales proposal within Salesforce, to automating document classification at the point of creation, and every content workflow between and beyond, our platform enables employees to create compliant, on-brand, high-performing business documents faster.

Founded in Denmark in 2014, Templafy is a global organization with offices in six major business hubs including New York, London, Copenhagen, and Sydney. Templafy supports over 2.8M users and enables over 600 enterprise customers like KPMG, IKEA, and BDO, to remove content anarchy from business document generation everywhere.