Industry Watch

This report compares strategies for outsourced, centralized and distributed scanning, and concludes that there is a move back to centralized scanning operations, along with a greater investment in capture and recognition software to automate data capture and indexing processes. Although outsourcing has cost and management benefits, quality of indexing and difficulty of integration back into electronic archives are given as the biggest disadvantages.

Meanwhile, more reliable and more capable scanners, more automated capture processes, and in particular, the availability of a multi-function scanner/printer in almost every office has led over the last 5 to 6 years to a new model of distributed scanning, local to the office staff processing the documents. In this report, we look at the issues and potential benefits of these different approaches, and consider the potential Return on Investment (ROI) across the more popular application areas.

Based on the experiences of over 450 BPM users within the AIIM community, this report details how long the payback period might be and the likely return on investment (ROI) across a number of potential process types. The study also covers the biggest project issues and critical factors for success. Users told us where they prefer to buy their BPM tools and what features and functions they have found to be most useful.

In most organizations, electronic records are still taken less seriously than paper records. Responsibility for applying good records management practice to electronic records would seem to reside in the IT Department rather than in the Records Department, and even where good policies exist, they are often not monitored or enforced. In this report we have compared volumes, policies and effectiveness between the management of electronic records and that of traditional paper. Legal-discovery and litigation-hold have created a demand for specific e-discovery tools, so we looked at their take up. We have also looked at the integration issues across multiple records repositories and measured long-term archive strategies.

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."