blog.frederique.harmsze.nl my world of work and user experiences

April 29, 2011

State of the ECM industry: We want to reduce our content chaos

Filed under: ECM — Tags: — frederique @ 12:35

In my previous blog post I’ve talked informally about our need to manage enterprise content. Now my colleague Walter Grabner pointed out this AIIM research report that has some interesting quantitative data: State of the ECM Industry 2011 – How well is It meeting business needs? (thanks Walter!).

One of the things that struck me, is that ECM is moving from an ‘administrative’ role into our daily work. ECM used to be all about compliance: records management, archiving records for legal reasons. But now organizations get a new Enterprise Content Management system to improve collaboration and processes. Especially information workers cannot do their jobs efficiently if the organization’s content is in chaos.

Unfortunately many organizations do experience content chaos: 50% of all respondents say their management of instant messages is “chaotic,” 31% for emails and 28% for Office documents. But fortunately organizations that do adopt a full ECM system feel a lot more confident that they can find and trust their information (62% of the organizations that do not have an ECM feel that lack of confidence but only 20% of the organizations that do have ECM).

Management of e-mails and their attachments is worse than that of electronic information in general. Only some of the new social information types – external blog posts, IM and tweets – are more chaotic, but these may not play a role that is important as e-mail yet. Unfortunately few organizations capture e-mail into a shared system and the most common way (39%) of dealing with important e-mails is to archive them in personal Outlook folders, where nobody can find them. Let’s hope these people store their important information in – for example – a SharePoint team site and only use e-mail to invite the stakeholders to read it there.

Maybe this is not just wishful thinking, because SharePoint is actually very popular: 58% of all companies and even 70% of the largest companies use SharePoint. Unfortunately 27% indicate that while they do store valuable content in SharePoint, they do not have policies on what to store and how. So they’re not there yet.

In the report you will find the full set of findings and recommendations.

AIIM graph: Content chaos

How well managed are the following types of information in your organization? (page 7 of the report)

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment

Powered by WordPress