Digital Landfill

Well gosh, 15 years sure goes by fast.

It occurs to me that after the last "AIIM" show -- see my previous post -- I had crossed the 15 year mark at AIIM.

Many thanks to all those members, staff, and Board members who made this possible and have been so forgiving of my many mistakes along the way. Given the somewhat tempestuous start -- and a big thank you to Barry Lurie, David Silver, John O'Connell and Peggy Linaugh for the many life preservers to survive those early days -- I never would have thought it possible to make it to 15.  

[Note:  Warning to newcomers to this industry -- this is a strange and oddly compelling industry from whose orbit it is hard to escape.]

When I came here, Joey and Will were 11 and 8, and Erin was almost 4. Jackie had not even been identified as a future daughter-in-law. I had hair. MG looked the same. Oh my.

As we embark on some exciting new work -- I just got back from a task force meeting headed by Andy McAfee and featuring 17 companies (ABBYY Software USA, Alfresco, Box.net, EvoApp, EMC, Open Text, Hyland Software, IBM, Iron Mountain, Jive Software, Moxie Software, Newsgator, Oracle, PFU Systems, Socialtext, Yammer) -- I can't help but wonder what the future will bring. The Task Force will probe the connections between social technologies and future business processes. It will be fun.

On the other hand, predicting is pretty difficult, especially when it's about the future. As a service to future historians, you will find attached the May 1996 INFORM magazine announcing my appointment.

And offering this prediction (thankfully not from me!) about the industry…

"Despite the euphoria of Internet enthusiasts and the hyped-up selling palaver of some web services providers, we remain uncertain as to the long-run substantive benefits the Internet will bring to businesses and to individual users.…until the webmeisters persuade us otherwise, we'll hang on to our CDs and floppies, along with the aperture cards and other imaging artifacts that have served our corporate and personal purposes so cost-effectively in the past."

As Jerry Garcia might say, what a long, strange trip it's been.

What were you doing in content management 15 years ago?  Why not post a comment? Have fun!

Download 1996 Inform.pdf (13717.0K)

We recently released our 2011 State of the ECM Industry Report, and I thought it timely to summarize the key findings in the report. 

1. Improving efficiency and optimizing processes are the key drivers for continued ECM investment across all sizes of organization. 
2. Compliance is still a significant driver, especially in larger organizations, but has fallen from a peak in 2007.
3. Improved collaboration is increasingly recognized as an important benefit of ECM. 
4. Two-thirds of those without systems have concerns about information accuracy and accessibility, particularly with regard to emails. ECM systems improve confidence in the integrity and retrievability of electronic information by a factor of three. 
5. 50% of all respondents describe their management of instant messages as “chaotic,” 31% feel the same about emails, and 28% for Office documents. “Content chaos” is by far the biggest trigger-factor for buying or replacing ECM systems.
6. Although 39% are still filing important emails in personal Outlook folders, 18% now have automatic capture to document or records management systems, or dedicated email management systems, with 19% relying on manual indexing by staff. 
7. 15% delete all emails over a certain age, whereas 16% keep them indefinitely. 27% have no policy.
8. Within the AIIM community, 16% of respondents consider they have achieved an enterprise scale ECM capability, up from 12% in the 2010 survey. 29% are in the process of implementing one. 
9. 72% of larger organizations have 3 or more ECM/DM/RM systems. 25% have 5 or more.
10. Consolidation of existing systems into a single-vendor ECM suite is a preferred strategy for 42% of organizations surveyed, with 19% utilizing an existing suite and 23% buying a new suite. 29% have a chosen strategy to maintain and update departmental or dedicated systems.
11. Amongst the largest organizations (over 5,000 employees), 4% are looking to a new single-vendor suite as their first content management project, compared to 16% of both small and mid-sized organizations. However, 15% of the largest organizations have no content management strategy in place. 
12. Over 60% of organizations would look to their ECM system to provide management of physical (paper) records as well as long-term electronic records retention. 40% also look for compliance with ISO, DoD or MoReq standards - and not just in government organizations. 
13. Case Management is important for 38%, and technical/large-format drawings for 33%. Overall, 30% cited a range of more specific requirements for their industry sector.  
14. 18% of respondents chose an industry-specific vendor in order to achieve their particular requirements. For those who chose a generic ECM vendor or suite, 35% took careful account of the ability to meet their industry requirements. 
15. 57% have some degree of local customization, and 27% have add-on products, or best-of-breed integrations. 
16. 28% feel constrained by their ECM/workflow system when it comes to making process changes, and for 15% it has limited their ability to achieve an enterprise-wide solution. 60% feel that their industry-specific requirements may restrain their ability to use SaaS or Cloud solutions.
17. Portalling is a popular option to provide employees across the enterprise with a single point of information access.
18. 19% are using their main ECM suite as a portal to other repositories and 23% are using SharePoint as a portal.
19. 28% are migrating content to a single ECM system.
20. 68% of installed ECM systems have no browser or mobile access options. 
21. 6% of organizations currently use Open Source ECM systems, and this is set to double in the next 2 years. In smaller organizations, 8% are using Open Source now and 13% have plans. 
22. 32% of organizations use outsourcing for paper archives, but only 7% outsource their electronic document archive. 4% are using SaaS or Cloud for ECM or document management, and this is set to double in the next 12 months. 
23. In particular, 6% are using internal corporate clouds, and less than 3% are using external public clouds. Use of outsourced corporate clouds is set to treble. 
24. 53% of larger organizations are using social business or Enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools inside the organization, compared with 29% of smaller organizations.
25. 55% have no policy on how long information stored on internal social business sites should be retained, and 32% have no acceptable-use policy for employees.
26. 54% are using SharePoint tools for collaboration and social sites. Only 34% of users are using dedicated, paid-for products, or SharePoint add-ons. 
27. Increased collaboration within and between teams is by far the largest benefit of social/collaboration tools. 
28. 58% of surveyed organizations have now implemented SharePoint, compared to 45% in 2010 and 33% in 2009.
29. This rises to 70% in the largest organizations. 6% are live on SharePoint 2010, with 27% in the process of upgrading. For 13%, the 2010 version is their first use of SharePoint.  
30. 23% of SharePoint implementations can be considered as optimized and mature ECM systems. Governance is still a big issue for 40%, including 27% who have yet to commit to a full roll out. 12% of SharePoint users are not using it in an ECM or DM mode. 
31. 49% have a defined strategy to integrate SharePoint with their existing ECM or DM systems, or even a new ECM system (6%). Only 4% are phasing out their existing systems in favor of SharePoint. 24% have yet to agree a strategy. 
32. Implementing electronic records management and agreeing on a corporate taxonomy are the two highest ECM priorities, followed by integration of repositories. 
33. Spending in most areas of ECM is set to increase once more in 2011, particularly for software licenses. Scanners and MFPs will hold their own. Outsourcing may fall slightly.

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