What does it take to be an ECM expert?

Editor's Notes

• #3: The spread of consumer technologies over the past decade that has driven the move to Systems of Engagement has also migrated expectations typical of consumer technologies (easy to use and deploy and available on multiple devices) into the enterprise IT environment.SaaS and cloud-based content and process solutions are creating opportunities to deploy solutions more quickly and cheaply than ever."The business" is increasingly demanding that IT staffs produce solutions that take advantage of the cloud and that are: 1) responsive to new demands to engage customers, suppliers, and employees; 2) quick to deploy; 3) more agile and modular than monolithic (i.e., more like an "app").To make things even more challenging, "the business" is demanding that these new initiatives be paid for by savings in legacy systems.Data points:Cloud computing spending among SMEs (1-1,000 employees) will double between 2010 and 2015 from $6.3 billion to $13.3 billion (In-Stat, http://www.instat.com)28% feel constrained by their ECM/workflow system when it comes to making process changes, and for 15% it has limited their ability to achieve an enterprise-wide solution. [AIIM – State of the ECM Industry]The total size of the public cloud market will grow from $25.5 billion in 2011 to $159.3 billion in 2020. The market for virtual private cloud solutions will grow from $7.5 billion in 2011 to $66.4 billion in 2020. The market for private cloud solutions will grow from $7.8 billion in 2011 to $15.9 billion in 2020. [Forrester, Sizing the Cloud]60 percent of organizations are ready to embrace cloud computing over the next five years as a means of growing their businesses and achieving competitive advantage. The figure nearly doubles the number of CIOs who said they would utilize cloud in the previous 2009 study. [IBM Survey of 3,000 global CIOs]28 percent of US organizations currently using cloud computing. [CDW Cloud Computing Tracking Poll]1/3 of organizations still unlikely to use cloud-based or SaaS solutions. [AIIM – State of the ECM Industry]Terminology confusion abounds - 13% of those who say they would not store content on the public web nonetheless use Salesforce. [AIIM – State of the ECM Industry]41% open to idea of cloud or SaaS records management solution – once security and reliability are “secure” [AIIM – Records Management Strategies: Plotting the Changes]
• #4: Social technologies have moved into the enterprise, and are beginning to transform organizational processes.Consumer sites like Twitter and Facebook initially exposed organizations to the potential benefit of using social technologies as listening posts to the market.Organizations are now beginning to understand that true Systems of Engagement mean more than just this public veneer; true Systems of Engagement mean embedding social technologies in the very nature of how an organization operates.Many early adopters of social and collaborative technologies were keen to try out different tools and services to see how they might work in a business environment. These pioneering toolsets have now converged to a much more defined set of products and application areas, and an increasing focus on integrating social technologies into the core of business processes.In just a few years we will cease to view “social” as a separate layer from process and the objective will be how to make the business itself social. 
• #5: Ubiquitous mobile computing is one of the core underlying drivers for Systems of Engagement and continues to shape the future of these systems. In the span of a decade, cell phones have spread to essentially every person and location on the planet.Less than half the devices accessing the Internet run on Windows, and the shipments of smartphones and tablets are now larger than the shipments of laptops and PCs. Mobile technologies have been the "steroid" accelerating the push to social technologies, and this push is now spreading to the business. We are only just beginning to understand the full impact of what it means to have location services attached to the actual device we use to deliver content and initiate processes.The spread of ubiquitous connectivity on consumer-centric devices has changed the nature of work and workplaces and what it means to collaborate in a business setting.Data points:94% of organizations have deployed mobile access to email, but < 30% have mobile access to enterprise systems -- ECM, CRM, ERP [AIIM -- Making the Most of Mobile:  Content on the Move]37% of organizations have no mobile ECM access; a further 30% rely on conventional web interface. [AIIM -- Making the Most of Mobile:  Content on the Move]Only 47% allow personal devices to access company data, and most do so in a policy void. [AIIM --Making the Most of Mobile:  Content on the Move]68% of installed ECM systems have no browser or mobile access option. [AIIM – State of the ECM Industry]
• #6: Last era was bout connecting computers, this era is about connecting peoplein the world of Systems of Engagement – no one on the user side cares about any of this. However, because these systems are being used by enterprises, they will inevitably be subject to the same legal and social restrictions as traditional enterprise content, and therein lies the rub. Today that rub is significantly limiting endorsement and adoption of consumer-style communication and collaboration facilities around the world, and it will continue to do so until the content management industry and its customers develop protocols and policies to address its issues.