State of the ECM Industry 2010: Enterprises Still Battling Content Chaos

While figures from AIIM’s State of the ECM Industry 2010 report indicate that the management of content across enterprises is still, to a large extent, chaotic and disorganized, they also show that there has been a considerable improvement on last year, and that many enterprises have finally seen the writing on the repository walls.

In the last year alone, for example, the research found that 12% of organizations have completed the deployment of an enterprise–wide enterprise content management system, a further 28% are still in the process of doing so and 15% are integrating projects across different sections of the enterprise.

However, the flip side of that is 21% have still to start an ECM project — although the report doesn’t say whether that means they haven’t started, or they haven’t started to plan — while 17% are only implementing a system for the first time. Let’s look at some of the key areas.

ECM Drivers

The massive increase in the amount of information arriving in enterprises appears to be the main driver for companies to deploy ECMs. While many have put it off until now, 60% of companies cite “content chaos” as being the principal driver in deploying an ECM.

That is not to say that the principal driver cited in last year’s report of achieving cost savings has disappeared, but is has dropped back into fifth place as a driver behind improved efficiency, optimizing business processes, compliance and risk mitigation.

And even in the extreme regulatory environment enterprises are working in now, improving efficiency and optimizing business processes are bigger drivers than compliance by a factor of 2:1 as opposed to three years ago when they were equal.

Document management

Not surprisingly, if “content chaos” is the principal theme running through this year’s report, then document management issues are also going to be a major problem too.

Taking document management and records management together, the highest current priorities for ECM activity are implementing electronic records management and managing emails as records, followed by the integration of multiple repositories.

This is not altogether surprising given that 41% are not confident that their electronic information (excluding emails) is accurate, accessible and trustworthy.

In addition, 56% of those surveyed said that there were not confident that the emails documenting staff commitments and obligations are recorded, complete and retrievable.

SaaS Document Management

Moving from document management on-premise to document management as a SaaS is also an emerging trend with the numbers of enterprises taking this route in the next 18 months set to double from 6% to 12%.

comments

Useful article?

 Email It      

Follow @cmswire

Related Articles:

• Alfresco Enterprise 4: Social, Collaborative, Mobile, Cloud Connected Content Management
• Is There A Business Case For Using SharePoint as an Enterprise CMS?
• Liferay Releases Dropbox Style Synchronization for Enterprises

Tags: aiim, business process management, compliance, document management, email management, enterprise 2.0, enterprise cms, information management, open source, records management, saas, sharepoint, social media

While figures from AIIM’s State of the ECM Industry 2010 report indicate that the management of content across enterprises is still, to a large extent, chaotic and disorganized, they also show that there has been a considerable improvement on last year, and that many enterprises have finally seen the writing on the repository walls.