Digital Landfill

AIIM conducts a series of Industry Watch (http://www.aiim.org/research) surveys (6 per year) on the major trends and issues related to user adoption of document, content, records, and web content management technologies.  

This “8 Fast Facts” list is based on the 2009 State of the ECM Industry survey.  To download a copy of the full survey, go HERE (http://www.aiim.org/Research/Information-Management-Research-ECM-BPM-ERM.aspx) -- you’ll also see a list of all of the other surveys that are available.

8 Fast Facts About the State of the Document Management Industry

1.  Cost savings most significant current driver.

Compared to recent years, cost saving has taken a clear lead over compliance as the main business driver for investments in document and records management. Tracking the most significant business drivers over a number of years shows regulatory control and associated compliance risk peaking in 2007 with a fall back in the last two years to cost savings. This is obviously due to the economic downturn - which was in part caused by insufficient regulatory control. We feel that compliance and risk avoidance may rise again once the dust settles over the many regulatory lapses and forced mergers. 

2.  E-mail a huge exposure for most organizations.

Despite a small improvement from last year, 55% of organizations still have “little or no confidence” that important emails are recorded, complete and recoverable (62% in 2008). Specifically, 27% consider email attachments to be “very unmanaged.”

3.  Legal discovery preparation mostly ad-hoc.

28% of organizations would take more than a month to produce documents for a legal discovery process, and there is a suspicion that those declaring 2-4 weeks are more in hope than truth, since this period is mandated in a number of data protection and freedom of information rules. As regards the likelihood of being required to produce such evidence, eliminating the “don’t knows”, 18% had been exposed to a legal challenge in the last 12 months and a further 15% in the last 3 years - a one-in-three chance.

4.  SharePoint deployments are all over the map.  

There is still a wide disparity in how organizations view SharePoint relative to their overall content management needs and strategies. In 29% of organizations, SharePoint is working in competition with, or in parallel with existing ECM, Document Management (DM) or Records Management (RM) suites, compared to 16% where it is integrated with existing suites and 12% where it is considered to be the only ECM suite. The remainder use SharePoint to “fill in some functions.”

5.  Records managers are often being left out of the SharePoint equation. 

In 36% of large organizations, IT is managing the SharePoint roll out with no input from the Records Management Department. A further 14% admit that no one is in charge and it’s completely out-of-control.

6.  The single ECM system concept is still alive.

35% of organizations still prefer the path of a single ECM system, whereas 33% plan to use a single sign-on portal to link together multiple repositories.

7.  License sales in the main areas of DM and RM will likely hold steady in 2009.

Predicting levels of spend has been difficult this year. Prior to this year, Gartner, for example, had published 8-12% year-on-year growth for ECM. The economic slowdown is affecting thatt, and in patchy ways across different markets. Based on responses from our survey base, it would seem that license sales in the main areas of DM and RM are set to hold steady, with the biggest falls likely in scanner hardware.

Vendor consulting services will be slightly less affected than independent consultancy services. Despite the usual predictions that outsourcing comes to the fore in times of cost-cutting, outsourcing and bureau services show a considerable cut-back - perhaps reflecting volume-based pricing, or reductions in back-file scanning.

Another casualty of discretionary spend reduction is external training for project staff, despite the survey showing that this is the 3rd most likely reason that projects run into trouble.

8.  The more exotic the content, the less likely it is to be managed at all.

We asked respondents to rate how well managed each type of content was in their organization, and it is interesting to match that against their level of importance to the business. Paper documents are still much better managed than electronic Office files, although there is a likely effect in many offices that paper filing procedures are deteriorating as electronic content takes over. Instant messages, SMS/text messages, blogs and wikis are largely off the corporate radar in 75% of organizations. Heavy handed governance of these nascent channels is considered to be old-fashioned, but given the potential external exposure, lack of policies and lack of inclusion in the corporate archive is a major risk.