Digital Landfill

In our most recent state of the industry survey, we asked end users about their familiarity with various standards and standards development organizations.

The conclusion? Consensus standards development processes (ANSI, ISO) continue to be important to organizations and fairly well-understood, with a significant drop off in understanding for other organizations. XML, .NET and web service based (SOAP) standards are best understood by end users, pointing to the emerging importance of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and interoperability (as reflected in AIIM's iECM project) as a vehicle to unify business processes.

Not in the official results, though, was a question about familiarity with a little known standard called XP9. The reason this is a little know standard is because I made it up to check on the BS quotient (or maybe it's just survey weariness) of our survey participants.

The good news -- hardly anyone fell for my trap. 92.8% indicated they had never heard of this standard, a very different recognition result than was triggered for all of our real standards. Among those who indicate they are "very familiar with the XP9 standard" --

1.4% of IT managers and executives...
1.5% of RM and DM practitioners....

and it will come as now surprise to those of the Dilbert school who question management...

4.3% of line of business executives and senior executives

Among end users that voice a forecast about how much they expect to spend on ECM solutions in the next 12-18 months, there is a clear split in the ECM market between mid sized organizations and large organizations. According to the most recent AIIM survey, the expected spend by mid sized (100-1,000 employees) organizations and large organizations (over 1,000 employees) is as follows:

• more than $1M in next 12 months -- 34% of large orgs; only 7% of mid-sized orgs
• 44% of mid sized orgs plan to spend between $100K and $500K.

The takeaway? These are very different end users -- with very different expected price points for ECM technologies.

When asked the question -- How confident are you, that if challenged, your organization could demonstrate that your electronic information is accurate, accessible, and trustworthy? -- end users in Germany, Brazil, and Ireland are much more confident than their colleagues in the US and the UK.

Among the end users in the most recent AIIM State of the Industry study -- the percentages responding they are only "slightly confident" or "not confident at all" to the question above were as follows:

• Ireland -- 10%
• Brazil -- 18%
• Germany -- 20%
• United States -- 37%
• United Kingdom -- 39%

The takeaway -- there is clearly un understanding in the UK and the US that there are major holes in their document management infrastructures.

We hear a lot about how hot the records management market is these days -- and it is.

According to the AIIM state of the industry survey, when end users were asked for their top project priorities over the next 12 months (and given 22 possible choices), the top 2 are remarkably consistent across job titles.

For all three groupings of survey respondents -- RM and DM practitioners, line of business executives, and IT managers and executives -- the top 2 priorities are identical: Document control and RM/archiving (with a slightly heavier emphasis on RM/archiving among the RM and DM professionals).

According to the latest AIIM state of the industry survey , how you view the business drivers for ECM depends a lot on where you sit.

For self-described records and document practitioners, risk-related business drivers are clearly at top of mind. 24% of RM and DM types see "compliance" as the primary driver for their interest in ECM, and 13% see "risk-reduction/business continuity as the primary reason. Among IT folks, the corresponding percentages are only 16% and 6%, and for line of business types, only 10% and 9%.

If you want to sell ECM to IT audiences, cost-related messages (bottom line) sell, with 27% of IT managers and executives seeing "improve efficiency" as the top ECM business driver (vs. 22% for line of business execs and 24% for RM and DM practitioners).

For those with line of business responsibilities, it should come as no surprise that a "top-line" driver -- "leadership/competitive advantage" -- is the top business driver (23%) vs. only a 12% response for IT people and 9% for RM and DM practitioners.

The takeaway? A little marketing 101: Craft your message to the audience.

The landscape is littered with IT implementation stories in which the more an end user gets into a project, the more disenchanted they become with the technology.

In the most recent AIIM survey on capture trends, we took a look a casual vs. serious users of capture technologies.  We first gave end users a list of a variety of scanners and recogition technologies and ask them whether they used ANY of them.  We then more specifically asked those that raised their hand about scanning use whether scanning was specifically used in 4 key processes (HR, Finance, Governance, Customer Service). 

This then gave us two interesting sets of scanning users. The first is those I would call "casual" users, who have some aspect of the technology present but have little integration of scanning into key processes.  The second were more "sophisticated" users -- those who have gone quite far down the path of document-enabling their processes by using scanning and capture in the 4 key process named above.

If you look at the perceived ROI of these two sets of end users, a pretty important result emerges.  When asked "How does the ROI of your scanning and capture implementation compare with other IT implementations?" 16% of our "casual" scanning end users said "Better" or "Much Better."  But among our "sophisticated" end users?  Those who have pushed scanning technologies directly into key organizational process?  50% say their scanning and capture ROI was "better" or "much better" than comparable IT investments?

The message?  Unlike many IT investments, at least for scanning and capture, familiarity does not breed contempt.  In fact, quite the opposite.

There's a lot of talk about the movement of the ECM industry into the mid-sized market (we define it as organizations with 100 to 1000 employees) and an awful lot of scrambling as suppliers try to figure out how to address the radically different expected price points in this market.  AIIM research indicates that while large organizations clearly expect to spend millions on their ECM solutions, the "sweet spot" for mid sized companies is way lower -- in the hundreds of thousands of dollars -- especially as you get into the lower ranges.

The reason for all the turmoil and churn is the sheer size of this market.  According to the Statictical Abstract of the US, there are 166,000 business enterprises in the US alone that fit this profile.  And with some esimates that 20% of these are actively looking at document and content solutions, there's a lot of opportunity here.

Those of you who are old enough may remember Sally Fields' acceptance speech at the Academy Awards in which she said something to the effect of "You really do love me.  You really do love me."  The allusion here is that after many years of toiling to convince end users that documents are strategically important, I think they are saying to us, "Yes, they are important!  Yes, they are important!"

Consider these data points (source:  2006 AIIM State of the Industry survey)...

• How important is the management of documents to your organization's strategic goals?  (58% "extremely important" and 31% "important"
• Has the importance of documents changed over the past 2 years?  (70% "more important now")

Over 89% of those surveyed believe that the management of documents is “important to their organization’s strategic goals,” and 70% believe that this importance has grown over the past two years.  The survey question was intentionally worded to link document importance to strategic business goals rather than to a less challenging proposition (i.e., specific document-intensive processes).  The response from end users clearly indicates that they understand this higher level link.  In many ways, this illustrates the reasons for the change in the perception of end users about the role of ECM technologies in their organizations, with nearly 90% of users now viewing these technologies as a core piece of their IT infrastructure.

So what's holding up the market?  I would contend that users get the "why?" question.  They need help with the "how?" question.  And that points to the need for an industry standard for education about how to implement these technologies (see this link for one possible solution).