Industry Watch #2

Once again AIIM has surveyed the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) industry. Corporate and government users, in six countries, mostly English speaking, were surveyed about their present and future requirements. While the results seemed to surprise John Mancini, who presented them at the last meeting of NCC AIIM, they confirmed my long held views about customers. The title of the survey is Back to Basics, the Search for Efficiency and Compliance.

Most customers are looking for Document Control, Records Management/Archiving and Information Capture. Surely this cannot come as any surprise. The creation, management, storage and retrieval of documents will always go to the heart of what this industry is all about. Information capture is simply about bringing paper documents into electronic format, the idea has been around for decades, but most organizations still are not using this technology, or using it for only limited purposes.

The bottom line is still the bottom line. For the most part users still view ECM technologies in terms of expense reduction rather than revenue enhancement. A blinding flash of the obvious. TechnoFlak started in technology selling automatic data collection systems and bar code labels. Much of the fun consisted of going to every imaginable organization, from hospitals to manufacturers and learning how they used information and then figuring out how to collect it automatically, instead of error prone manual systems that took weeks to get information to management. In those days it was called office automation and you were supposed to dramatically reduce labor costs and recover the cost on the investment in a matter of months. Sometime during the last boom it ceased to be about the customer and all the talk was about state-of-the-art cutting-edge-technology. It was about who had the sexiest technology, not who was helping the customer. Then the industry choked on its own hubris and we are still figuring it out.

The survey is available in PDF format on the AIIM website.