When the term Enterprise Content Management (ECM) was first coined some seven or eight years ago, the stated objective was the same as it is today–to bring all of an organization’s unstructured content into a managed environment for sharing, controlled access, findability, and archive.

The vision then was to provide a single repository, accessible by all staff, capable of dealing with all kinds of content, servicing business processes across the organization, and providing a single, secure records archive. The obvious parallels were in the enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management systems that were already established as enterprise applications.

To this end, document management and records management vendors of that time set out on a path to become ECM vendors by equipping their products with modules to cover every type of content and content process, either by organic growth, or more frequently by acquisition.

Today, however, there is a general appreciation that ECM is more of a blanket term to cover information management technologies for unstructured content. In some organizations, it may indeed be a single system capable of dealing appropriately with many different types of content and records requirements.

In others, it may be a collection of repositories and applications. The common goal, however, is to provide users with a singleaccess capability allowing them to find, retrieve, and process information from wherever it is stored, without needing to login to multiple applications. Increasingly, underlying content services infrastructures have emerged as a base for content management and business process applications.

The goal of this report was to determine the extent to which users are achieving this goal, how they are achieving it, what effect collaborative technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint are having on their view of how to do it, and what their spending plans are within the different areas of ECM. We also reflect upon the drivers and motivations for improved content management, and the degree to which return on investment is being achieved.

Key Findings

• 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 percent of organizations having little or no confidence that important emails are recorded, complete, and retrievable.
• 28 percent of organizations would take more than a month to produce documents for a legal discovery process.
• There is still a wide disparity in how organizations view SharePoint relative to their overall content management needs and strategies. In 29 percent of organizations, Share Point is working in competition with, or in parallel with, existing ECM document management (DM) or records management (RM) suites, compared to 16 percent where it is integrated with existing suites and 12 percent where it is considered to be the only ECM suite. The remainder use SharePoint to “fill in some functions”.
• Records managers are often being left out of the equation. In 36 percent of large organizations, IT is managing the SharePoint roll out with no input from the RM department. A further 14 percent admit that no one is in charge and it’s completely out of control.
• The single ECM system concept is still alive in 35 percent of organizations, whereas 33 percent plan to use a single sign-on portal to link together multiple repositories–SharePoint being the most popular tool for doing so–with nine percent stating they will use enterprise search to solve this problem.
• License sales in the main areas of DM and RM are set to hold steady in 2009, with falls likely in scanner hardware, non-vendor consulting services, and, surprisingly, outsourcing and service bureaus.
• SMS/text messages, blogs, and wikis are largely off the corporate radar in 75 percent of organizations. Their lack of inclusion in the corporate archive is a major risk.

Conclusions
ECM as a product has completed its transition from imaging, paper replacement, and forms processing. It is now a pervasive infrastructure providing search, access, process, collaboration, and archive capabilities for an expanding range of content types across the organization.

Most organizations are far from reaching this ideal, however, and many are still wrestling with issues such as email, messaging, and enterprise 2.0. However, those who have achieved a degree of cross-departmental integration are seeing solid returns on their investment, both in hard-dollar savings from process improvement, and soft-dollar benefits such as better customer service, improved compliance, and better decision making.

The arrival of the major IT vendors has created the concept of ECM as an infrastructure, servicing integration with other enterprise systems as well as the more traditional document-centric processes. This in itself has created challenges of ownership between IT and the traditional records management functions with a number of “joined-up decisions” yet to be made.

The arrival of document-centric collaboration portals has raised issues of how these popular and prolific tools sit alongside or on top of the more intensive process and records management disciplines that have previously been the cornerstones of the ECM concept.

Doug Miles is head of AIIM’s Market Intelligence Division. He has over 25 years’ experience working with users and vendors across a broad spectrum of IT applications and was an early pioneer of document management systems for business and engineering applications.