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Alan Pelz-Sharpe

When 66KB really equals 4.12MB

1-Sep-2010

Tags: Document Management (ECM), Information Architecture

Just as Route 66 in the United States has taken on a mythical status, 66KB is begining to take on the same legendary status in my own little world of ECM (Enterprise Content Management).

66KB is the metric I use to represent the average document in a typical public or private sector organization. This is not just a random guess you see, it is an educated random guess. When you take into account the regular and small documents (the tiny notes and memos) alongside the wacking great Powerpoint slides that most firms store, then 66KB turns out to be a pretty accurate average file size. Whether you use a mean, median, mode, or wild guess method to calculate, it typically comes out somewhere around 66KBs.

I find many people tend to think that the average document size is much higher than that, and in your organization it may be. But whether you employ my average number or use your own, the fact is that most documents are not individually all that big when you come to think about it. 

However, you then need take into account:

• All the changed versions
• All the duplicate copies lying around
• The copies sent via e-mail for information or review or no clear reason at all
• The drafts, the final drafts, the finals, and the final-finals

Suddenly that 66 KB file can be better calculated at around 4.12 MB. Or to put it mathematically if we take a geometrical progression of two then:

66 KB x 2 = 132 KB then 132 KB x 2 = 264 KB then 264 KB x 2 = 528 KB then 528KB x 2 = 1.03 MB then 1.03MB x 2 = 2.06 MB then 2.06 MB x 2 = 4.12 MB, and so on. It's always a little unerving how these things stack up so quickly isn't it?

Or to put it yet another way: for every 4.12 MB you have sitting on your system, it is quite possible that only 66 KB of it is of any value at all. Regardless of exactly how you do this calculation, in my experience the outcome has always been that the vast majority of what we pay to store and manage on our information management systems is complete and utter junk.