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Warmth is finally
returning to the country and to the enterprise content and records management
(ECRM) market. For vendors and end users, this means turning their attention to
industry trends, new technologies and management issues. As always, the
difficulty is in reading the tea leaves correctly to determine what is truly a
trend. So here are some trends you can expect for this year.
SharePoint 2010
Without any doubt,
the big story in ECRM this year is the release of Microsoft's SharePoint 2010. SharePoint is the most successful product in the
history of one of the world's most successful companies. It has been widely
used in corporate and government organizations for a diverse array of
applications. SharePoint is an infrastructure that includes functionality as a
portal, collaboration, replacement for network shared drives and
document/records management. In SharePoint 2007, Microsoft has had basic
functionality for document and records management, but it can best be described
as "check-the-box" type functionality that didn't compare to
mainstream ECRM software from traditional vendors. Problems with scalability
and true records management were often not discovered until after organizations
had deployed SharePoint 2007. With the new improvements to SharePoint 2010,
organizations are going to find a more robust product than ever before.
Most ECRM systems
support integration to SharePoint. Some permit objects to be stored in
SharePoint while others just use SharePoint's portal capabilities. With
SharePoint increasingly controlling the user interface and the new features in
SharePoint 2010, vendors are going to face new challenges in their awkward
relationship with Microsoft. One other issue for vendors is that SharePoint
upgrades from 2007 to 2010 will consume IT resources and dollars — potentially
delaying new or expanded ECRM implementations. Fortunately, the upgrade from
2007 to 2010 is substantially easier than the upgrade from 2003 to 2007.
Enterprise Deployments
The last 20 years of
ECRM deployments have largely focused on line-of-business or departmental
applications. But today, organizations are realizing that they can gain cost
savings in enterprise deployments. In any case, legal and regulatory
requirements often mean that records management is critical to the organization
and using the technology across the organization is the best approach. Many
companies have multiple vendors in-house serving different departments. Moving
to an enterprise deployment (with single records management administration)
means difficult decisions about platform consolidation or integration between
platforms. More often than not, organizations select a single software product
and sunset the others. Upgrades to new software versions or changes to the user
interfaces are common during these consolidations. As a result, software sales
are likely to remain flat in 2010 even as services revenue continues to
increase.
Document Harvesting
ECRM is the ideal
platform to apply universal and consistent records management administration. Unfortunately,
a lot of records are stored on shared drives or in unstructured SharePoint team
sites. Getting those records into the ECRM system is difficult because they
lack structure and metadata. Also, they are often duplicate documents and, even
worse, not all of those documents are actually records.
A wide range of new
technologies, collectively called "document harvesting," are providing tools
to help address these problems. No vendor has a complete solution, but niche
vendors, like Active Navigation and Vital Path, are acting as complimentary
tools for leading software OEMs.
Return to ROI
Continued pressure
on the global economy and tight credit restrictions means that every IT project
is carefully scrutinized before being approved. Technology for technology's
sake has given way to traditional cost savings and budget reduction. CIOs (and
their bosses) want to see clear justifications of ROI before they will approve
new projects. Expect payback periods of less than three years or even faster
before most projects are being approved.
Cloud & SaaS
Not only do
organizations want fast ROI, but they want to accelerate deployments and reduce
their up-front costs. Cloud computing and ECRM software as a service (SaaS) are
already fast-growing segments of the population, but this is going to increase
at an even more accelerated rate. Microsoft is spending billions to build data
centers that can host applications like SharePoint and their CRM products. A
new version of Microsoft Office will run as a cloud model — further paving the
way to make more organizations comfortable with data being outside the
firewall. Even the federal government is getting behind cloud computing with a
significant push. Former federal government CIO Karen Hughes noted that the
government is good at buying systems but is weak at maintaining them. That is a
sentiment that many commercial firms can empathize with as they move to more
applications in the cloud.
Email Archive
An email archive
that integrates to ECRM, records management and e-discovery tools has been
common for several years, and the deployments will continue to increase. Organizations
today are forced to select very strong point solutions, like Symantec's eVault,
or use ECRM solutions from vendors, like EMC, Open Text and IBM, that
incorporate emails along with other documents.
Tablets
SharePoint 2010 will
be big, but tablet computers like Apple's iPad will be utterly disruptive in
the long run. Inexpensive portable devices will dramatically reduce paper data
entry from some markets like healthcare. But the big thing for corporate IT
managers is recognizing that tablets based on the iPad and Google's Android
operating system do not run Microsoft Windows: ECRM systems that rely on
Windows-specific thin-client implementations will have to be rewritten. Tablets
also bring the concept of "always connected" to business operations. In
the past, business users mostly were connected by email, but with tablets, they
will have access to their entire corporate infrastructure.
Privacy
In the US, we have
mostly focused privacy on identity theft, but overseas (especially in Europe)
privacy is considerably more evolved. Multi-national corporations are already
faced with requirements that don't permit personally identifiable information
to be stored outside of the country origin or kept beyond a certain time. So a
life insurance claim for someone in France that is administered by a US company
with data entry operators in India not only is difficult for the workflow
process, but privacy rules may force organizations to stop doing business the
same way. In some cases, it prevents the use of cloud computing or requires
local cache servers to store personally identifiable information in the country
of origin. It also changes the rules used for records management disposition
and may require more metadata (and, therefore, more OCR or data entry) in order
to comply. Privacy rules in the US are starting to strengthen, and
organizations are looking to ECRM to help, but older system themselves often
need to be modified too.
DAN ELAM [delam@iqgroup.com] is vice president
of IQ Group, a global management consulting firm focused on ECRM technologies.
He is chair of AIIM's Emerging Technologies committee and former US technical
expert to ISO.
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