ECM by Numbers

Welcome to "ECM by Numbers"

Hi, I'm Doug Miles and I'm the Director of AIIM's Market Intelligence division.

We carry out 8-10 ECM-related research surveys a year amongst the AIIM end-user community. Most of the reports are published on the AIIM website as free downloads - here. We don't measure market sizes and vendor market shares, but focus instead on the business drivers, implementation issues and user strategies for content management - ECM, ERM, Social Business, Mobile, Cloud, Big Data and SharePoint. If you're planning to implement a system, download the reports to help build your business case, and to spot the issues you may come up against.

In this blog I highlight survey results from the latest AIIM surveys.  You can download all of the reports for free from here. 

Secret Agents

A useful class of software that seems to be cropping up a lot lately is what I would call "housekeeping agents."  Some are simply batch programs, run periodically. Others stay resident and spot digressions from policy or pre-set rules as they occur. The easiest to understand are de-duplicating agents that will confirm from the content of documents and emails that they are duplicates, even if some aspects of the metadata (including the filename) are different. Some users report a 40-50% recovery of disk space. Then come metadata generators that analyse the content and re-classify it, adding metadata that can help with indexing and e-discovery, but also aid with enforcement of deletion policies. I've also come across system performance monitors that simulate user response times and identify database bottlenecks and suchlike.

Finally, there are what I call the "secret agents." These analyze potential security infringments such as confidentiality grading, restricted access, unprotected personally identifyable information, intellectual property, and so on. The analysis of the actual content is based on a set of pre-determined rules, and they can be run in batch, but more usefully, when run as an agent, can check documents immediately they are added into SharePoint or other content systems. Given the inconsistencies (and downright laziness) of most users, these agents would seem to be a godsend for those who need to enforce compliance, and perhaps even more importantly, they demonstrate to auditors an intent that security and governance is taken seriously.    

Our report on security agents for SharePoint is available here.

 

Stay Close to Your Career Plan

Working on the AIIM White Paper "Career Development for Information Professionals," sponsored by Oracle, it struck me how your career is something very personal to you, and yet although you own it, it's also buffeted and steered by the organizations you work for, the places you live, the people you live with, and for many of us, huge slices of good luck, bad luck ... and knowing the right people. Intriguingly, that very personal thing which is your career timeline is now also very publicly visible through LinkedIn and even Facebook.

We surveyed nearly 800 people for the report across IT, IM/RM and business types. What came out strongly is this desire for recognition of working at that real-world boundry between IT and business. There was a strong recognition of "information professional" as a profile, and an aspiration to move to that role - not just from records specialists and IT specialists, but also from business people. 

We compared salaries and qulifications in the report - it surprised me that two thirds have at least one technical or business certification, and 43% have two or more. There was also general agreement that certifications are a more up-to-date indicator of competence than college qualifications.

There are plenty of graphs and things in the report comparing the skill sets people have, the ones they would like to improve, and the ones that recruiters say are hard to find. But returning to my opening theme, whichever way your career twists and turns, the most important thing is to provide value. That's why you get paid, and increasing your value is the best way to get paid more. Increasing and updating your skill set is one way to add value. Contributing to discussions about ways the that your organization can take advantage of all the new technologies - mobile, social, cloud and big data - is another.

Big Data - what's holding you back?

I have to say that 6 months ago I was somewhat skeptical about big data and how it had a relevance to AIIM. After researching and writing up the recent Industry Watch big data survey (free to download here), and doing a couple of presentations,  I still think it's somewhat over-hyped, but there is something emerging which could to make running a business a good deal more precise and responsive, in much the way BI did in the late nineties.  And people seem really excited about the "big data meets big content" idea of linking up structured, transactional databases, and the more "fuzzy" content-based stuff.

What also comes out is that once people say "Seems like a good thing to do, what's the next step?" they realize that (a) they don't have enough in-house skills, (b) they have no idea how to connect across their different data sets and repositories, (c) this stuff can be quite pricey, and (d) their content is in such a mess that they stand little hope of extracting agregate value from it. Oh, and the content security guards get all defensive about reaching-in to all this sensitive data.

AIIM UK Roadshow

I'm off on the annual "rock" gig that is the UK Roadshow this week - Edinburgh Monday June 16th, Leeds Tuesday 17th, Birmingham 18th and  London 19th. This will be the 20th Roadshow. Quite an achievement for any event, but also an interesting reflection on the continuing relevance of our association and our topics. Of course we are still the go-to show for scanning and capture, and we cover ECM and ERM, but there are also now a whole bunch of SharePoint add-on products to see, and some social collaboration products, and some mobile capture platforms, and I'm talking in London about Big Data. 

Otherwise, be sure to catch John Mancini's morning keynote. I'm on at lunchtime on "ECM by Numbers" You can download my slide sets here and here.

A Cloudy View of ECM

I seem to have had lots of Cloud in my life of late, but that's because the UK had its wettest April since records began, and right now the river is rising... In the Process Revolution survey (report here) I tried to follow up on the apparent success of products like Box and Dropbox and SkyDox and the pundits view that these are the new Wild West of content management. Just as SharePoint came along a few years back and offered project teams a cheap/free and easy to use place to put all of their project stuff, and it ended up as an ungoverned free-for-all, so now the same thing is happening but it's out on the web, beyond the firewall, and beyond all that tedious control that was put in place for SharePoint, which is now considered to be obstructive and hard to use - "legacy" even (let alone Documentum, Livelink or Filenet!).

Turns out only 17% of respondents were prepared to agree with me on that, but then maybe they can't see what's happening under their information governance radar. Anyway, I also asked about cloud deployment of ECM, and it's interesting that 11% are looking to a fully cloud model, mostly folk new to ECM,  and 14% are considering a mixed model, with half saying they'll put a version of their existing product in the cloud and link back, and half using Box or whatever and synchronizing that to their existing on-premise ECM. In my view it makes sense to plan for a cloud hybrid, rather than let your users run around the outside of you.

 

Big Data survey

Following up one of AIIM's "Big Themes" for 2012, we're currently running a survey on Big Data - but be assured that we're not heading off in a completely weird BI direction. Many of the most interesting big data applications involve unstructured data like sentiment analysis of social networks or fraud detection in insurance claims, or analysing patent applications or case notes. In fact we're focussed on where "big data" meets "big content". Some of the most interesting applications are where structured and unstructured data can be linked for cross-corellation - and in fact, 55% of the respondents so far have said this would be "very useful" for their business. 

You should find that just answering the questions is thought-provoking as to where you might use this stuff. Of course, there's also the usual chance to win an iPad in the prize draw - and this will be a shiny new iPad-3. Take the survey here: http://www.aiimhost.com/survey  Thanks!

  

This is my favourite result from the latest Industry Watch report "The Paper Free Office - dream or reality."  Ten times faster response for nearly a third, 3x faster for most! Given that response to "customers" whether internal or external is a significant KPI for most organizations, this is a massive result and explains why we repeatedly measure an ROI on scanning and capture of 18 months or less for the majority of projects. We cover lots of other stuff in the report - digital mailrooms, capture-to-the-cloud, outsourcing, mobile capture and more. Free download here. 

Oh and yes, paper is reducing in a net of 3% of organizations overall, and in a net 15% of the largest organisations, and you could save 8% of your office costs within 5 years with an all-electronic filing policy. Craziest finding? 77% of invoices that are sent as electronic PDF files end up getting printed.

25% Savings in Legal Costs

This is the most compelling finding from the recent Industry Watch survey on Records Management. It's quite a broad sweep of costs - legal costs, court costs, fines and damages - and of course, best practice records management, security and e-Discovery is quite a big ask. Mind you, 13% consider they already do this. We tried to get some idea of what percentage of revenue these costs represented, but the answers were all over the place, so it's best to stick with this reduction percentage. Around 25% on average across the board and 50% or more for 22%. That's a big saving in costs for a department which is a pure overhead anyway.  Full report here from Nov 22nd.

Social Business Reality Check - the real benefits

 
"Social business applications improve knowledge sharing amongst employees!" Not the most amazing headline. After all, that's really what you would expect them to do. Except that it is the single most powerful argument to take to the most senior decision-maker in your organization. Which CEO wouldn't be interested in leveraging all the things each member of staff knows so that all the other members of staff can share it.

And back that up with the second one - faster response to questions and queries. Answering questions posted on a company-wide Q&A panel is the simplest way to share knowledge. In fact, onother stat in this survey is that in 38% of the organizations that do this, a half or more of the answers come from unexpected sources - people you wouldn't guess would supply the answers, so a currently untapped source of knowledge and innovation.

Two other things on this graph. Saving time and money on meetings and travel comes way down at  ninth on the list, but is the only one you could actually put hard dollar savings on. And improving retention of younger staff comes bottom - it's trivial compared to all the other benefits, so lets stop saying it! Download the full report from here.

Business case for Social Business/Enterprise 2.0

 
I'm just writing up the next Industry Watch report which is called "Social Business Systems – success factors for Enterprise 2.0 applications". One of the classic things that always crops up in the E2.0 debate is how to make a business case for investment. As you can see from the graph, compared to last year’s report, there's a drop in the number of respondents who are required to make a financial case for investment, and a significant increase to 27% in those organizations who now consider social business applications to be part of the infrastructure - in much the same way as email, messaging or teleconferencing. The survey numbers also show that the IT department tend to be the heaviest users and they make the decisions on social business investments. They also set the governance, which may not be such a good thing! The full report will be published on October 4th here.