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 ECM, ERM, BPM, Social Businezz/E2.0 and, of course, 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.  Latest report on "Records Management Strategies"  is available for a free download here.  Current survey is on scanning and capture "The Paper Free Office - myth or reality." It will run from Dec 2nd to 6th  here - and it's another iPad-2 winning opportunity!

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.

Who's using the new ECM Features in SharePoint 2010?

 

Have Microsoft finally fixed the content management issues in the 2010 version of SharePoint? Well according to our Industry Watch survey (downloadable free here)  40% of people are using the managed metadata and the other taxonomy services. That’s encouraging…but these are “AIIM literate” folks, so is 30-40% actually a good result? When we asked what were the biggest issues in upgrading to 2010, standardizing on a taxonomy or metadata template was the biggest single issue, higher than re-applying customization and re-training staff.

All these new services are quite hard to understand, as anyone who has been through the AIIM SharePoint training course will know. In a traditional ECM implementation, most of this would be set up by vendor post-sales consultants, so we are actually expecting a lot of the average IT department here if they think they can do it with the help of a few Microsoft videos.

There are a couple of other questions in the full report that basically show that people like the new development tools. They are still somewhat ambivalent about the ECM functions. They aren’t that convinced on records management. And they are still keen to use 3rd party apps.

 

Using SharePoint for ECM

Publishing the annual Industry Watch survey report on SharePoint coincided with my spending a week on the AIIM UK Roadshow. It was an enjoyable if exhausting week, and a good show, with  many of the exhibitors commenting on the number of SharePoint ECM projects that are finally taking root in some major UK organizations and public bodies. This chimes with the response from the survey - which is free to download here. Companies seem to be taking a little longer to upgrade to 2010 than was at first predicted, but in doing so, they are thinking better about how to use the new content classification and taxonomy rules, and putting right many of the things they got wrong on the 2007 deployment.  

Despite predictions that the 2010 vesion would obviate the need for 3rd party add-in products and integrations, the report shows that over 75% of users plan to utilise one or more add-on products, the most popular being workflow/bpm, followed by analytics & search (presumably FAST). After security and rights management and back-up support comes records management and archive, reflecting the continuing view that out-of-the-box SharePoint records management isn't up to some heavy-weight needs.  

AIIM Roadshow Presentation

Presenting the keynote at the UK AIIM Roadshow this week - Edinburgh, Bolton, Birmingham and London. Download my presentation, "From Content Chaos to Corporate Collaboration" here.

Nearly there with the SharePoint Survey 2011 report

We have the results,  we're just waiting on the design of the report. Heads up is that 3rd party ECM add-ons are still very popular despite the added content management functions of 2010. Upgrades to 2010 seem to be taking a while with only 8% of users live, plus 6% who are first-timers direct to 2010. In 6 months time, over 50% say they will be live on 2010. Interestingly, standardizing a taxonomy or metadata template was the biggest upgrade issue, showing that the new functions are being adopted - except maybe the RM functions - but over 60% still plan to use add-ons. Re-applying customization, and training staff were the next two issues. Much more to come! 

Cost Reduction is Still Main ECM Driver

 
 
Looking back through my blogs, I can't believe I have never featured this signature AIIM survey finding. We've been tracking this since 2004, and it charts the rise of the big compliance scares of the mid-decade, and then the fall back into cost-savings of the recession years. It's also hard to believe that we only introduced Collaboration into this last year.

One thing to take on board is that this is based on all survey responses, so it shows the motivation for continuing to put resources into ECM no matter what stage of adoption the respondent is at. We also asked those in the survey who were just recently implementing a new ECM system what was the trigger issue that made it happen, and overwhelmingly it's that "content chaos is getting out-of-hand".   Read the full report on "State of the ECM Industry 2011"  - free download here.

Solving Industry-Specific Requirements for ECM

 
Every organization is inclined to think that its ECM requirements are somewhat special, although when you look across the board, that frequently isn't really the case. In the latest State of the ECM Industry 2011 report (free download) we take a closer look at vertical requirements, and in the report there's a list of 17 potential requirements from physical records management (needed by 63%) through standards compliance (needed by 40%), case management (also 40%), to high security for in-motion data (12%).  

What the graph here shows is how people have chosen to meet their special requirements. Although 37% opted for a careful choice of generic vendor, 18% chose an industry-specific supplier or solution. In total 57% have some degree of vendor or in-house customization. And when we later asked if that might affect their ability to use a cloud ECM solution, 60% said yes or maybe.  

ECM Has Become a Replacement Market!

 
So many interesting findings in this year's State of the ECM Industry report. What this one shows is that the replacement market for ECM systems is twice as big as that for greenfield sites. It also shows that most larger companies have more than one system - generally as a result of departmental procurement, aquisition or geographical subsidiaries.

What comes over strongly in this year's report is that those organizations are keen to consolidate systems into one information access point, either by portalling into multiple repositories, or by migrating content to a single system - and a surprising 36% are planning to do just that, more often that not choosing a new system as the basis for consolidation rather than an existing one. Take in the 12% starting out fresh, and we get 48% who believe in the "Big ECM" concept - contrary to the view of some other analysts.