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).
Recent Comments