At today’s European Advisory Trade Member meeting I asked a panel of leading ECM suppliers for their perspectives on “sleeper” issues in the ECM market – issues that they believe are not receiving sufficient attention. Some of the highlights…
1. Customer readiness for new technology… “The reason why so many CRM initiatives failed was that management and the organization did not understand that CRM was a fundamental strategy and business culture/mindset change. Comprehensively managing content in an organization requires the same sort of strategic shift. It is not a technology problem, but a business problem focusing on how stakeholders communicate, how business processes are expressed, and how the business is architected.”
2. An explosion of content types… ”The vendor community has been busy consolidating--consolidating products into platforms, building out new features, adopting web 2.0 and developing new and wonderful features that they think customers want. However, different types of content demand different management strategies. Buying and bolting together content technologies may seem good on paper, but in reality, pulling these together increases the complexity of systems dramatically. A system that tries to do everything might possibly work for small organizations, but may not be feasible for larger enterprises.”
3. Solutions must focus on usability… “The ability to easily use content management systems is key, as content underpins almost all activities in a business and any invasive disruption will meet resistance. End user adoption leads to successful content management. This means the content management technology must be integrated into line of business applications--no web pages springing up for the end user to complete, no browse and upload functionality, and the ability to capture all file types of seamlessly."
4. The important of a unified customer view… “Customer service is one of the most difficult tasks in today’s business environment. Everyone is following a multi-channel strategy and wants to have a 360º view of the customer. A customer has an integrated view of their interactions with a company. However, it very hard to ensure that the company has that same integrated perspective of the customer.”
5. Content analytics or text analytics… “We are entering an era in which the need to analyze the use of content is critical. We will start to see a trend to associate value or relevance to the corporate information based on usage patterns and some form of social interaction. I think we will start to see combinations of BI techniques applied to content use and content interactions.”
6. An explosion of security concerns… “The application of DRM or IRM techniques inside enterprise will grow. Data security, traceability and privacy concepts applied to documents and emails will become much more common place than they are today.”
7. Compliance isn’t everything… “A lot of organizations use compliance as the main business driver for the implementation of an ECM solution and often focus on securing compliance for one particular regulation such as Sarbanes-Oxley. The key efficiency ROI benefits from process efficiency and process improvement are being over-looked.”
8. Don’t overlook integration into key applications… “Integration of any ECM solution into key applications is critical, but very rarely considered during the scoping of the solution. As technology systems mature and business capabilities expand, integration becomes a key factor in the success, or failure, of a project.”
9. E-mail management a killer app… “Email as a major part of an ECM solution is being overlooked. Email management/control must be a key factor in any ECM strategy. In fact, it could turn out to be the most important factor in the future."
10. Movement of ECM to the infrastructure… “Content Management is becoming more of an infrastructure issue than ever before. ECM is mainstream and organizations are looking to take an architectural approach to ECM implementation. That is a crucial decision, not dissimilar to the decisions organizations made on the 1990s on database and ERP. However a key part of choosing an infrastructure is also the availability of value-added vertical applications.”
11. The convergence of archiving and content management… “Many of the services required for archived content are the same as for in-flight and live content. We see similar requirements for archiving unstructured (i.e., documents, images, reports) and semi-structured content (i.e., email) but repositories will have to scale to meet the sheer volume of content.”
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