Feature

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 18 No 03 - June 2010

The annual AIIM survey into ECM drivers and strategies shows that although cost savings and productivity improvements are the overriding business drivers, content chaos is the main buying trigger for ECM systems.

AIIM's Doug Miles discusses the findings  

Enterprise Content Management is at something of a tipping point. Driven by the need to control the content chaos that pervades file shares, email systems, and legacy document stores, organisations large and small are looking to impose order through ECM. Alongside this, the positive benefits of information sharing and improved collaboration are resonating with decision-makers, pushing forward projects to join up repositories and provide enterprise-wide electronic access. Compliance is seen as an added benefit, but the prime driver is the need to maximise the productivity of employees and enhance their engagement with each other.

ECM Business Drivers

As we see in Figure 1, improving efficiency and optimizing business process are the two strongest drivers, followed by compliance and risk mitigation. Grouping these factors into Cost, Compliance, Customer Service and Collaboration, we see in Figure 2 the mid-decade effect of stronger regulation being overhauled by the more recent recessionary imperative of reducing costs.
Whilst these primary drivers provide the justification for ongoing commitment to ECM, we also asked those planning or newly implementing an ECM system what specific factors had triggered the decision to go ahead. Interestingly, "content chaos" was by far the strongest reason, listed by 60% of respondents, with knowledge-sharing in second place at 29%. 

Two questions have characterised the AIIM State of the Industry survey over the years, bringing home the compliance issue across electronic documents and emails: "How confident are you, that if challenged, your organisation could demonstrate that your electronic information is accurate, accessible, and trustworthy?" and "How confident are you that emails related to documenting commitments and obligations made by you and your staff are recorded, complete, and retrievable?"
This year 41% were slightly or not-at-all confident about electronic information, and 56% lacked confidence in their emails. Interestingly, only 11% of those with an enterprise-wide system lacked confidence in electronic information, compared to 66% for those with no system, but even with an ECM system, 49% have still not solved their email issues. A comparison of the results in past years is shown in Figure 3.

ECM Adoption

We can see from Figure 4 that over half of the organisations within the AIIM community are breaking out of departmental information silos and are moving towards enterprise-wide content management. In this survey, 12% have already completed an enterprise scale or company-wide capability, albeit that ECM has become something of a moving target. Additional content types such as email, voice, video, instant messaging and blog posts have extended the scope of what can be termed "Content".
It would be easy to assume a linear adoption model based on the purchase of a single ECM system, but the reality is that over a third of organisations have multiple systems, or legacy systems that are due for replacement. Of the 34% of new system implementations reported here, half are legacy replacements and half are first-time users.

Open Source and Cloud

There are some well-established ECM suites that use the open source model, with a 6% installed base in our survey. This is set for considerable growth, with a further 9% stating plans to adopt open source within the next 2 years. Most respondents have an open mind on the use of Open Source, with 64% stating that they would consider it. Reduced initial licence cost and cheaper ongoing support are given as the most likely reasons, closely followed by "Simplicity/ease of use."
The AIIM community seems somewhat sceptical about cloud solutions for content management, with 3% using it now and just 2% with plans. There is an understandable reticence to entrust documents and records to third-party clouds, even if they are provided by trusted brands such as Google, Amazon, or Microsoft. Only 28% would consider using a branded cloud, even if it was stored within a national (onshore) locale. Even with the availability of a corporate cloud or a government cloud, 50% would still not contemplate its use.

Outsourcing and SaaS

Compared to the 39% of organisations who make use of the traditional outsourcing of paper records archives or box stores, outsourcing of electronic records is only used by 14% - although another 9% of organisations have plans in the next 18 months. The 25% who outsource document and forms scanning are set to be joined by a further 6%.
Outsourcing of complete business processes is set to grow from 7% of organisations to 12%.
Looking at the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model for outsourcing the document management system itself, only 6% of organisations currently do this, but this is set to double in the next 18 months. Offsite management of emails also seems set to grow over the next 18 months to 10%, from a small current base of 4%.

SharePoint

The adoption of SharePoint in the last three years as an IT infrastructure platform has been dramatic, and much of its success has been due to its browser-based collaboration capabilities. IT departments in particular have been keen to adopt the team-sites concept for project coordination and knowledge sharing. SharePoint is also capable of providing a large proportion of the functionality previously associated with dedicated ECM suites, albeit to a lower level of capability than the feature-rich, industry-sector optimisations available in many of the traditional products. In many companies, this has produced confusion with regard to existing rollouts and the definition of future strategies.
In total, 32% of our respondents have SharePoint 2007 in use, with a further 21% in the process of implementing, making a total of 53% of the survey. This compares to 42% in last year's survey, a proportionate increase of 26% on last year's user base. A further 21% plan to implement SharePoint 2007 in the next
12-18 months.

Unfortunately, in more than half of organisations, the rollout of SharePoint functionality is taking place in a very unplanned manner in relation to existing ECM deployments. 46% agree that they need a plan as to where each will be used, but do not have one. A further 12% do not know where to start.

Conclusion

As we enter the new decade, good information governance is accepted as essential to good business, and ECM, as a combination of technology, policy and process, can indeed provide good information governance and improved compliance. However, it can also bring major collaboration and knowledge-sharing improvements as well as efficiency and cost-savings to the business process.
As we have seen in this report, the final tipping point for users would seem to be the content chaos that is overtaking their file shares, email systems and distributed repositories across the enterprise. We are therefore seeing a real will within the user base to create workable ECM systems, linking repositories together, and extending content and records management across multiple media types.

The full AIIM report is available as a free download from www.aiim.org.uk/research. Based on 751 responses from a selected sample of AIIM's 65,000 strong community of ECM users worldwide, the report is independent. It is underwritten by sponsors including ASG, EMC, Nuxeo and Rivet Logic.

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