ECM by Numbers

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.