Why should document management make the short list?

OK.  We all know we’re in for an interesting ride over the next 12-18 months.

[Note:  Over the past few months I have periodically recalibrated my retirement age relative to the DJIA in my Facebook status.  With the market at 7500 this evening, I am formally estimating my retirement age now as 249.]

But I digress.

We all know that IT projects will be a challenge next year.  We had a speaker at our Document Management Service Provider Executive Forum who indicated that projects in 2009 for his company needed to meet three criteria: 1) no capital expenditures; 2) any proposal must pay for itself in the current year; and 3) any proposal must be implemented within one quarter.

What do you think?  As IT projects are scaled back to only THE most important, why should document management make the cut?

[Another note:  Twitter updates now available at jmancini77.]

See also:  10 Commandments for an Effective Document Management Project.

Comments

[Joe Bachana]

Its too early to get overly optimistict, but I'm seeing an uptick in investments by our customers in their document management, digital asset management, and Web content management infrastructure. It seems, however, that it may not be in NEW systems but rather leveraging existing technologies that have already been purchased. I think one reason I'm seeing -- many of those companies have had deep layoffs in the past month or two and need to do more with less, so DM/DAM/WCMS are seen as ways to improve productivity.

Now if only someone would cough up real ROI studies to verify that qualitative observation I just made!