ECM: The next big thing?

Alaa Owaineh believes the enterprise content management (ECM) landscape is changing – and drastically. “Regulations increasingly demand that companies keep their records, e-mails and audit trails along with customer records,” he says. “In addition, the importance of online channels is also playing a significant role. This is particularly important in areas like retail banking, media and the retail sector where online channels are becoming more central to the business.

“Companies are more aware that a lot of their knowledge assets are stored in unstructured ways. They are looking for ways to tap into this and ECM can help.”

Organizations are becoming savvier to the benefits of these solutions and how investment in ECM can reap many dividends. The bottom line is that such tools can help to increase overall profitability and effectiveness at an organization. “One element of this is knowledge management and making sure that the intellectual property – the knowledge of people that work in the company that accumulates in e-mails and unstructured data on their desktop or shared folder on the network – is accessible to everyone at the organization,” highlights Owaineh.

“Another benefit is how it helps with risk, avoiding a breach of regulation and complying with government requirements. Also, it ensures that there are clear audit trails to whatever the organizations does, especially on the financial side. Finally, ECM has a lot of value in terms of making sure that all the necessary data is available to the right people – ensuring that the lack of access to content doesn’t hurt enterprises’ bottom line.”

A wave of consolidation means that the market is very much dominated by the big vendors, as independent vendors have reduced in number following buyouts by their more powerful counterparts.

“Companies such as EMC and IBM, for instance, provide a robust ECM platform that provides all the general features, but they also allow third parties to build applications for these platforms – vertical applications for specific industries or applications for specific uses and scenarios,” says Owaineh. “These vendors are becoming more and more powerful. They are increasing their impact on the market, increasing their user satisfaction, reputation and recognition.

As with business intelligence, ECM tools are gradually filtering down through the ranks to smaller companies. “ECM used to be a purely large enterprise play, but now more and more vendors are creating solutions that are suitable for SMEs. This will be another driver for growth. Companies will tap into this unexploited market and provide more ECM solutions for small enterprises.”

One area that the report highlighted as needing particular attention by vendors is their customer support and client engagement. Owaineh outlines the findings: “It came out quite clearly in the survey that, on average, the satisfaction of end-users with these aspects are quite low relative to their confidence in the product quality, which gets twice as much in score on average.”

As for the future of ECM, Owaineh foresees a few developments, particularly when it comes to the crucial role small vendors and their more bespoke and specific solutions can bring. “In terms of industry solutions, it’s really hard for really large vendors who provide a platform to focus on very specific industry solutions – solutions that would serve law firms or manufacturing companies,” highlights Owaineh. “They do offer them but they are customized versions of their generic solutions. There are many small vendors who focus on a very specific niche area and do it very well. The challenge for enterprises is to minimize the management cost of the ECM solution and that’s why broad platforms are really attractive.

“The most interesting innovations will come from smaller companies who’ll have focused solutions with narrow applicability. These will definitely be underpinned by integrated large platforms from the big vendors.”

Financial services ‘a top document challenge’

A recent AIIM survey has revealed that the document channel is strong and healthy, with 10% year-on-year growth in the customer base for document management service providers.

“We believe that as core ECM technologies become more mainstream, the document channel will play an increasingly important role in meeting end-user needs,” states AIIM President John F. Mancini. “The more effective companies in the channel are increasingly focusing their efforts on specific vertical industries or key processes. It is no longer enough to be a generic solutions provider.”

The top vertical priorities for the channel reflect the traditional industries with significant document challenges. At the top of the list is healthcare, which most likely reflects the increasing need for automation and compliance solutions – 78 percent of survey participants provide solutions for the healthcare industry, up from 66 percent in the 2005 survey. Financial services (two-thirds of solutions providers are active in these two verticals) and manufacturing (66 percent) complete the top four slots.

Content is king

In a recent survey of CIO Magazine subscribers, respondents indicate that ECM is both a business and an IT priority within their enterprises. So how can CIOs leverage content in a way that makes knowledge workers more productive?

1. Create an enterprise-wide plan for standardizing your ECM platform. Islands of automation simply don’t cut it anymore. The result is chaos: multiple content silos across multiple ECM platforms from different vendors, making for an environment that is difficult to manage and expensive to maintain. That’s why the majority of respondents are standardizing on a single ECM platform throughout the enterprise.

2. Make content integration a top priority. It’s important to create an environment in which information is pulled from multiple sources and shared among applications to provide knowledge workers with a single view of the customer, project or even product. Standardizing on a single ECM platform simplifies this integration, ensuring access to timely, accurate and consistent content across the enterprise.

3. Find a vendor that is on top of BPM. Business transactions of any kind rely heavily on information – sharing it, using it to make decisions and keeping transactions current. In fact, it would be futile to automate business processes without content, so it’s absolutely critical to find a vendor who is committed to building BPM into their product suites.