New AIIM Study on SharePoint Shows Planning, Governance Still Lacking

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Jul 9, 2010

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AIIM has a new SharePoint research report out that looks at SharePoint from an Enterprise Content Management perspective. Are the results really all that surprising? And do we expect that SharePoint 2010 is going to change things?

A Check in With Last Year's Report

Although not completed directly by AIIM, Information Architected did do a SharePoint study on behalf of the organization which involved some about 600 of its members. The study was done in November of 2008 and published in March of 2009. Here's a glance at some of the key findings:

83% currently use, or are planning to use, SharePoint
SharePoint is more widely deployed at the workgroup or department level
75% said implementation of SharePoint took one year or less, which would make sense considering
47% use it primarily for File Sharing (and/or as an internal Portal - again 47%)
Few use it for complex business processes, records management or digital asset management
It is seen as a component of a larger Enterprise Content Management strategy
47% said they would use it as an Extranet/Internet solution (whereas 22% do already) - this was one a little surprising

You can read our review of that report here.

So that's where we were with SharePoint a little over a year ago. What, if anything, has changed?

SharePoint Usage Today

Although we aren't saying this is an apples to apples comparison of reports, some of the findings in this latest AIIM study — which involved approximately 600 of its members — does tell us a few things. Here are some of the key findings of the Industry Watch - SharePoint strategies and experience.

74% are using, or planning to use, SharePoint (47% MOSS, 7% WSS, 14% have a MOSS implementation in process, 6% in next 12 months).
Interesting that 8% of respondents use SharePoint 2003
45% use it for collaboration between partners, 18% for customer interaction
Collaboration is the most popular use (especially Team Sites), then document management followed by file share replacement
60% use SharePoint out-of-the-box, 39% customize it and 28% use 3rd party integrated applications
Of the 3rd party apps, the most popular today are Workflow/BPM, Security and Rights Management and Search/Analytics. Enterprise 2.0 is 7th, but there are already a high number of implementations in place
1/3 said it took longer than expected to implement, but few indicated cost overruns (23% said it was technically more difficult than they expected)
SharePoint is still primarily an IT-owned solution or departmental (23%)

SharePoint's Role in ECM

In this study, many see SharePoint as their first significant implementation of Enterprise Content Management although 2/3 already have some existing ECM, Document Management or Records Management Solution in place.