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the Free CMSWire NewsletterThe Real Story Group published its annual report on the enterprise content management industry last week. We talked to Real Story Group (RSG) Principal Alan Pelz-Sharpe, who outlined some of the main findings and who argues that the industry has already passed a turning point which will result in some established and newer trends gaining ground in the year to come.
The first thing to be said, apart from the fact that it has turned a corner, is that the document management industry is growing, says Pelz-Sharpe. The RSG research shows that far from hitting the industry, the current recession has seen many enterprises sticking with traditional vendors.
Pelz-Sharpe also points to the level of activity in and around newer cloud-based offerings. Enterprises looking for solutions that provide efficiencies to carry out their business dealings with reduced work forces see the cloud-based offerings as one possible solution.
There is also a growing awareness amongst enterprises of the need to manage their information resources better. While many will recognize the need for change, companies will be looking at specific areas where they need to change — an example being the need for better payroll administration — and as often as not, this requires specific solutions, rather than monolithic systems that cover everything.
The result is that 2012 will be the year when applications come into their own, a trend we noted late last year in Forrester’s ECM Wave report.
Pelz-Sharpe goes on to focus on a number of areas where considerable change is taking place and will continue to take place over the course of the year:
SharePoint
SharePoint, including SharePoint 2010, has found its niche. There was tremendous excitement around both the 2007 and 2010 releases, but it has found its place and the world has moved on.
In many respects, the selling point of SharePoint when it was released was that Microsoft was able to market it as something that was easier to use than other systems, but the emerging cloud-based products are out-SharePointing SharePoint and pushing themselves as applications that are easier to use and manage than SharePoint.
Pelz-Sharpe goes on to say that with the recession, enterprises are also looking to perform more process orientated work: they need to manage contracts or correspondence. While SharePoint definitely plays a role in those work streams and enterprises are using the workflow capabilities, it is not a business process management application per se.
He says that when we talk of business process management (BPM) applications, we are talking generally about a big process engine with execution language and thousands of processes running every hour. In these scenarios, SharePoint doesn’t really have a role.
Enterprises are looking for BPM to better manage the time of their workers. They are also looking for more visibility about who is doing what with any contract at any point in time, and what stage the contract is in. SharePoint won’t provide the level of detail that this requires.
Document Management
Pelz-Sharpe observes that for straightforward document management, enterprises are either going to already proven traditional vendors or sticking with what they have and improving it as needed.
Businesses can see a clear value in document management. If there is a problem in the enterprise, it is easy to see how a document management system will provide the solution for their problem. With the newer social technologies, the case is not so obviously clear.
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