In looking at the results of this year’s AIIM State of the Industry report (www.aiim.org/industrywatch), I was struck by how dramatically the core business drivers for content and document technologies have changed over the past four years – in the direction of risk-centered drivers.
Now a couple of caveats are in order when thinking about this data: 1) the sample was not the same each year; 2) the sample, while global, has become a bit more tilted toward English speaking countries in the past few years; and 3) clearly end users in real life don’t typically implement ECM solely for one of these reasons.
But even with this caveat, it is striking how the drivers for ECM technologies have shifted in the direction of risk reduction over the past few years. These risk-driver end users cite reasons such as “business continuity” and “compliance” and “legal concerns” for their interest in content and records management. This migration is understandable given some of the events over the past five years—one could almost plot such events as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, Katrina, and the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedure on the chart.
Perhaps a better way of understanding the above chart is to think of an information management pendulum that is constantly swinging between “access” and “control.” Customers expect companies and government at all levels to deliver services that have the ease of use of an Amazon, coupled with the security of a Fort Knox. Given the explosion of new information management mandates and requirements over the past few years, it’s no wonder that the pendulum now clearly seems to be swinging in the direction of “control.”
Some interactions with my now college graduated first-born (Note to readers: There is no sweeter raise you can get than the end to a college tuition!) remind me, though, that the tension between access and control is indeed a pendulum and is constantly in motion. And they also remind me that once this next generation enters the workforce, we are going to indeed see all sorts of tensions and demands back in the direction of access.
Example #1: Like many people my age, I live on email. I ran into a cartoon recently that depicted a support group with a guy in the middle proclaiming, “Hi, I’m Barry and I check my email 200-300 times per day.” That’s me, the Crackberry addict.
Now when I think about my kids and how they use email (and this gets more pronounced the younger the kid), I realize that when I send them an email, I immediately also send them a text message to tell them that I have sent them an email. Otherwise, a week or more might pass before they see it.
• Lesson #1: With good cause, organizations are spending a lot of time and money right now trying to get email under control. However, this is just the beginning. The balkanization of information—PCs, phones, voice mail, texting, and instant messaging are just the beginning—is real and inexorable.
Example #2: Given that we live in Northern Virginia, we know a great many kids who go to Virginia Tech. In the first hours of the Virginia Tech tragedy, we were very concerned about whether the kids we know were OK. The news media didn’t seem to know much of anything.
About 2:00 in the afternoon, my son called and said that all the kids from our high school were safe. I asked him how he knew this given that lots of the cell connections were very strained with Blacksburg and that the media seemed to know nothing. He told me that all the kids had used Facebook to create an impromptu and unofficial network of networks to instantly share what they knew—obviously without any real plan beforehand and without any real involvement of “official” information sources.
• Lesson #2: The next generation of entrants to the workforce will demand massive and unscripted collaborative information networks, creating a massive push back in the “access” direction of the pendulum.
Example #3: Shortly after our first-born graduated, he and three friends took off for Southeast Asia. (One observation on how things have changed…those of my generation did everything they could think of to avoid going to Southeast Asia after college graduation.) Just before going (advanced planning perhaps being a subject they could have spent a bit more time on in college), they decided to set up a blog. Within just an hour, they had the blog set up. They were posting to it—pictures and text—directly from their cell phones. And they didn’t spend a dime. (For the curious, check out www.travelsinsoutheastasia.blogspot.com.)
• Lesson #3: Massively complex, non-intuitive solutions will not cut it in the decade ahead. Nor will massively expensive solutions. Anecdotal evidence from end users suggests that the actual cost-per-seat of ECM solutions has shifted by an order of magnitude in the past 24 months. Some of this is a function of a massive expansion in the scope of implementations. Some of this is the price pressure being created by the core content service players and the open source players. But something very fundamental is happening and it will also push the pendulum back in the direction of “access.”
So the net-net: With good cause, the momentum in the industry right now is in the direction of “control.” But let’s not forget the “access” side of the pendulum. There are forces out there right now collecting to change things once again.
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