Digital Landfill

And the Survey Said….

USA Today has come out with a new survey - apparently, three out of every four people make up 75% of the population.  (David Letterman)

As many of you know, AIIM conducts a variety of industry trend and benchmarking surveys (see http://www.aiim.org/industry-watch.asp for free downloads of many of these surveys for blog readers).  The topics of the surveys range from capture to business process management to content security to document management and just about everything in between.  The basic goal of these surveys is to quantify the user experience with document, records, and content management technologies. 

We often ask similar questions in multiple surveys in order to get comparative data.  In preparing for a recent presentation, I ran across a similar question in three different surveys.  I think the disparate answers to this question provide clues as to some of the challenges facing the industry and those who sell its solutions.

Here’s the question:  “Please evaluate the return on investment (ROI) of your organization’s spending on X [more on the ‘X’ in a minute] compared with other significant IT investments.”

Now here’s where some slight variations on the question enter the equation:

• Survey 1:  X = “distributed scanning and capture”
• Survey 2:  X = “scanning and capture”
• Survey 3:  X = “document, records, and content management”

As Richard Dawson used to say on the Family Feud television show – “And the survey SAID…”

The 28% with a negative assessment of their content, document, and records implementations is just plain troubling.  And I think worth a pause to reflect on the causes of this disconnect between satisfaction on core scanning and capture and more comprehensive implementations.

We know from other surveys that the obstacles end users encounter rarely involve the actual technology and often fall into a few major buckets:

1. Lack of vendor neutral education and training in the early stages of a project (i.e., “what can we learn from those who have gone before us?”)
2. Poor initial identification of business requirements (i.e., “what are we trying to accomplish?”)
3. Lack of attention to the governance structure (i.e., “who is calling the shots?”)
4. Overly complex solutions (i.e., “why is this so hard?”)
5. Lack of top management commitment (i.e., “who is going to make sure things happen?”

Let's hear some of your thoughts....