Social Business Community Blog
By ,
May 13, 2010 - 4:29 PM
The Enterprise Content Management (ECM) industry has gone through significant transformations over the course of the past decade. A seminal event that got ECM on the mainstream map was the Enron debacle a few years ago, followed by Sarbanes Oxley, followed by Federal Rules of Civil Procedure changes that occurred in late 2008. My point is that a series of events increased the need for better information governance, and the logical suppliers were those that provided information management capabilities using their ECM technologies.
It can be argued right now that information governance as a market might even be a larger addressable market than the ECM market over the next few years, largely because of increased regulation and significant exposure to organizations from mismanagement and poor governance of information.
One of the big reasons for information governance becoming even more critical is the advent of E2.0 or social computing. More and varied different content types keep getting added to the already mushrooming volume of information. Effective governance without obstruction of creativity is critical to mitigating risk while maximizing productivity and innovation.
Wikis, ad hoc collaborative content, microblogs, and blogs like these typically don’t have good governance policies enforced around them. Those suppliers that provide solutions to address this problem will find themselves in high demand. Those that don’t effectively position themselves for it will be at a great disadvantage due to the rapid growth of social business content.
Coming up with effective solutions won’t be easy, however. If usability and governance aren’t completely balanced, enforcement will be nearly impossible to achieve. Given the popularity and proliferation of cloud-based models in social computing, it might be an ideal time for the ECM vendors to bring about information governance capabilities as a cloud service. Furthermore, it will be imperative for the providers to embed the user experience of content governance in the authoring and collaboration applications. Having records management as a separate UI might be good for a few, but the masses will need to have a default setting for the records management policy so that they don't need to do much, and if they don't agree with the default, they should be able to change it with a few clicks. The benefit of a cloud based, UI-less approach is most likely to garner adoption for governance of social content.
Here's a topic for discussion: Do you believe that cloud-based social content governance will be a viable alternative for your organization? Please weigh in with your comments.
Rate Post
You need to log in to rate blog posts.
Click here to login.
This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International
