Industry Watch

Business take up of Enterprise 2.0 has doubled in the last year. According to this AIIM report, there has been a dramatic increase in the understanding of how Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, forums, and social networks can be used to improve business collaboration and knowledge sharing, with over half of organizations now considering Enterprise 2.0 to be "important" or "very important" to their business goals and success. Only 17% admitted that they have no idea what it is, compared to 40% at the start of 2008. However, only 25% of organizations are actually doing anything about it - but that is up from 12% in the previous survey.

AIIM has found that a third of organizations have no policy to deal with legal discovery and 40% might need to search back-up tapes to find emails that could be relevant to litigation. The AIIM survey also found that 84% would have no way to justify why emails of a certain age or type had been deleted. Only 19% have the facility to move important emails into a document or records management system, or a dedicated email management system, and 45% of respondents are still filing their important emails in personal Outlook folders.

AIIM's annual State of the ECM Industry research found that 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. Email is still out of control, with 55% of organizations having little or no confidence that important emails are recorded, complete and retrievable. Management of content types like SMS/text messages, blogs and wikis are largely off the corporate radar in 75% of organizations and their lack of inclusion in the corporate archive is a major risk.

Microsoft SharePoint has captured the ECM market’s attention. While some may argue that SharePoint is not a panacea and is perhaps being over-used, many organizations around the world are reportedly using it for one or more ECM-related projects.

This Industry Research report looks at whether SharePoint can be successfully deployed enterprise-wide, if it's best suited for particular applications, if it's capable of addressing all of an enterprise’s content management needs, and does it have particular functional strengths and weaknesses?

A new AIIM survey among 400+ IT decision makers and influencers found that 89% of respondents think effective management of electronic information is “very important” or “important” to the long-term success of their organizations. The respondents claimed a surprising confidence in their information management systems with 63% indicating they were “very confident” or “quote confident” that they could prove their electronic information is “accurate, accessible, and trustworthy.” Only 9% of those surveyed expressed a lack of confidence in their information management systems.

Despite the importance of management (as part of enterprise content management), the front-end functionality—content capture—is fundamentally critical to any ECM system. Content capture is any tool, technique or technology that enables the digitization of content so that it can be managed in an ECM.

Despite decades of theories and methodologies from BPR to Six Sigma, many organizations still find that processes are unowned, unmanaged, and out of control - in short, many organizations are "process ignorant."

Is Your Organization Searching or Finding? In AIIM's new Market IQ on Findability, 82% report that their experience with “consumer Web” has created demand for improved enterprise findability.

Organizations recognize Enterprise 2.0 as critical to the success of their business goals and objectives, but do not have a clear understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is.

Excerpts from AIIM President, John Mancini's Keynote Address -- 4 March 2008 -- AIIM International Exposition and Conference

There are four intersecting tensions in the marketplace that have been at work over the past 2 years and are aligning right now to change all of this and to truly create the mainstream market that we have all thought was on the horizon.

#1 - Control
Over half of those surveyed have either marginal confidence or no confidence in the integrity of their electronic information. That awareness alone is doing a lot to change the “pain”/”make the pain go away” equation.

#2 - Access
We are moving into an environment in which document and records capabilities will be within the reach of tens of thousands of workers within large organizations, not just the hundreds of document intensive process specialists.

#3 - Volume and Impact
As document awareness spreads from the Fortune 500 to the Mainstreet 1.3 million, we are going to see a renaissance of awareness and concern about paper.

#4 - Simplicity
Greater implementation simplicity and consistency for end users.