Joe Shepley on Enterprise CMS Trends for 2011: A Business-Centric View

By Joe Shepley (@joeshepley) Dec 14, 2010

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You've heard many predictions on enterprise content management in 2011 from the tools and technology perspective. Now let's step back and examine what's to come from a business-centric perspective.

ECM is About More than Technology

There are a lot of “ECM trends for 2011” already piling up out there, so I’m a bit hesitant to add one more to the bunch. But in reading over the 2011 trends posts available now, they seem to be very technology-focused, talking about what capabilities or functionality will rise and fall in 2011, how organizations will be buying (or not buying) ECM tools, what vendors will acquire or get acquired and so on.

What I haven’t seen much of is trends for Enterprise Content Management approached as an organizational strategy rather than just a set of technology applications.

So with that in mind, I figured I might was well throw my hat into the ring and prognosticate along with the best of them, but from a more business-centric perspective.

Here, then, are my ECM trends for 2011:

Business value will be king
ECM will become increasingly concerned with managing content within cross-functional, value-chain activities
Organizations will address the people and process dimensions of ECM in order to get more out of their current (and future) investments in technology
The seeds of SharePoint’s demise are already sown

You’re probably saying, “Hey, number four isn’t about business, it’s about ECM technology.” You’re right — it is. But as you’ll see below, I come at ECM technologies from the angle of business innovation rather than features and functionality, which makes me feel a little better about including it here.

1. Business value will be King

The biggest trend in 2011 will be the increasing importance of demonstrable business value, rather than technological innovation, as a driver in the ECM space. This is another way of saying that, if there isn’t going to be a tangible, meaningful impact on the business from ECM (or anything else, for that matter), it won’t get done in 2011.

Of course, we’ve been talking about technology not being an end in itself for a long time now, ECM or otherwise; but I think it’s safe to say that this has been more aspirational than descriptive of how IT has actually been practiced.

This rising importance of business results for ECM is not coming out of nowhere — over the last eighteen months, the evolution of the IT function towards “CIO 2.0”, the maturation of the ECM domain and the protracted recession have come together to increase the importance of business value to all things ECM.

But by the end of 2011, even if the economy is on the road to recovery, the landscape of ECM will have been permanently shifted, and accountability for business results will be a core expectation going forward.

2. ECM will become increasingly concerned with managing content within cross-functional, value-chain activities

A close second to the centrality of business value as an ECM driver will be the focus on enabling complex, cross-functional processes at the value chain level, e.g., supporting the customer communication value chain or managing lifecycles (assets, customers, products).

Two things are driving this. First, most large organizations have tackled the sweet spot, first wave enterprise content management applications, e.g., enabling paperless, straight-through processing of high-volume transactions (bank account openings, insurance claims, credit card processing). Second, the rapid emergence and adoption of social collaboration among the workforce is putting pressure on organizations to deliver similar levels of functionality to what employees are used to in their personal computing lives.