ECM Outlook 2008, Part 2: Compliance and other concerns still market drivers

By Marvin Pyles
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Published on Mar, 17 2008 in ECM, WCM, Portals Open Source, SaaS Records Management, Compliance
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The first part of our ECM Outlook 2008 discussed the emergence of Microsoft Sharepoint as a legitimate ECM application. Even though SharePoint is the 1000 pound pink elephant in the room, other issues like compliance, collaboration, and lower deployment costs continue to drive the ECM industry. Part two discusses five additional key factors and common concerns.

1) Compliance is still a market driver, but other issues are just as pressing.

Numerous government regulations such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Department of Defense 5015.2, CFR Title 40-Protection of the environment, or U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 21 CFR Part 11 continue to help drive the ECM industry.

Compliance is still a driver and has gotten even more intense, says Wayne Crandall. Additionally, companies are confused on implementation strategies; particularly in regards to civil procedures & roles.

“Because of the collaboration workflow functionality built into ECM suites,” says Crandall. “It’s important to ensure that compliance databases are adhered to, audit trails are in place, and inspections are put in place.”

However Greg Clark of C3 Associates says there’s slightly less focus on compliance and more focus being placed on organizational efficiency. Particularly, a recognition that more efficient ways are needed to manage an increasing mass of unstructured data.

"I think you’re going to see SaaS start to emerge in 2008. We (BP) are not ruling out SaaS as a strategy, but I don’t think it will really start to take off until 2009."
Russ Stalters, Director of Information & Records Management for BP America.

“There has to be a better way of dealing with all of this unstructured information lavishing on shared drives,” says Clark. “Being efficient and compliant at the same time is important. I don’t think one is necessarily more important than the other. Although I’m starting to see a lot more push on the efficient side, corporate governance is not a fad. But we need be to more efficient. We need to out compete.

2) Control and consolidation of multiple repositories continues to be a major concern.

It’s an age old problem. Large companies have an abundance of content repositories across the organization. Accessing that information through a common framework will help increase organizational efficiency.

Michael Elkins, principal and founder of Kestral Group says his large customers are especially concerned about consolidating multiple repositories. As well as grappling with the concept of creating common taxonomies to pull information together.

“You look at the ECM industry as a whole; it grew up as a number of department initiatives. So now there’s a bunch of silos of information,” says Elkins. “I think you’re going to start seeing things become a lot more transparent for the users. The Google paradigm. If you do a Google search you don’t care where the content comes from. That’s in essence where you’re starting to see the impact of SharePoint. I don’t really care where the content comes from in the back-end. From that standpoint, I think you’re going to see ECM step out from the niche, more specialized area and start to be a little more flexible on how people can view content."

3) ECM is a core part of an organization’s infrastructure.

More and more organizations are using ECM applications as a platform of shared services for all employees to use rather than department by department.

"I think there’s a general movement from ECM becoming a commodity as a core platform," says Jim Nasr, CEO of Armedia. "To be a real value add, there’s a realization that the platform has to be more of a solution framework than just a general placeholder for content management."

Martyn Christian, VP of IBM’s Enterprise Content Management group says ECM as a platform can be confirmed by the growing number of license agreements he sees in implementations. "I think we’re on a maturing curve as opposed to major changes in deployment. Going back 3 or 4 years, a larger license agreement might have been a few thousand users. Today, a large license agreement would be in the many tens of thousands. In fact, we even have a handful of cases (in telecom, manufacturing, and financial services) that are over a hundred thousand users, says Christian.

Marvin Pyles has worked in the "trenches" of software development. He has gained considerable experience in the content and collaboration industry working for as a analyst for various companies including United Parcel Service, Sapient, Inc., Keane, Inc, and First Data Corporation. Marvin has written several in-depth articles and case studies on enterprise applications for various private firms & publications including Intelligent Enterprise and KMWorld.

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