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Content Management: Payback Time

2005-05-16 admin

New research published by AIIM analyses adoption patterns of ECM technologies and solutions and their evolution into the mainstream.

"The survey clearly demonstrates that ECM technologies are becoming part of the core infrastructure of both large and mid-sized organizations," notes AIIM President John F. Mancini. "Users who first look to the huge cost savings and rapid return on investment of ECM solutions are now also examining the compliance and process improvement benefits of ECM."

"We found a great practicality among end-users in their approach to ECM. Across the entire sample, the top 5 projects under consideration by end-users -- records management, document control, email management, information capture, and forms handling -- reflect the practicality and need for short-term ROI that is characteristic of most IT investments in the current environment."

Key Survey Findings:

Finding: There are clear differences among the nine countries surveyed in the business drivers for ECM solutions, with compliance and risk reduction a far more important issue in some countries than in others.

Finding: While cost-reduction is still dominant in driving decisions, customer- and risk-related business drivers are rising in importance. There was an almost 20% decrease over the past two years in the percentage of users citing cost-driven concerns as the primary reason for looking at ECM technologies. In Germany, those naming compliance as the primary reason rose from 2% (in 2004-2005) to 7% (in 2003-2004), in the UK, the percentage rose from 13% to 17%, and in Ireland the percentage rose from 9% to 19%. In the US, the percentage rose from 17% to 24%.

Finding: As the scale and scope of implementation increases, the obstacles encountered shift -- from getting senior management commitment and defining requirements -- to "softer" (although conversely much more difficult to address) obstacles such as change management, maintaining employee commitment, and content integration. For example, for users in the UK, requirements definition is twice as likely to be a major obstacle among those who are just beginning to investigate ECM solutions. Selling the project to the executive management and justifying its cost continues to be a far greater challenge for new potential users than for experienced users.

Finding: There is remarkable consistency across nations in terms of the project and technology interests of end-users. Users are focusing on extremely practical applications with clear payback. If it can't be justified quickly, it won't get approved.

Finding: Email management, forms, and security are growing concerns for end-users. It is clear that the increasing media coverage of privacy, security, and email disasters is reaching the ears of end-users. Interests in projects like email management, forms handling, and statutory and regulatory compliance, increased the most in the rankings since our last survey. The rising technologies identified by end-users mirror this: content management/web content management, email management, and security.

Finding: Mid-sized organizations (those with 100 to 1,000 employees) understand the need to get their core document requirements under control and represent a huge untapped market. These organizations voice their concerns in terms of business continuity and risk -- with 40% planning projects over the next 12-18 months.

Finding: The mid-sized market for ECM solutions is very large due to the sheer number of mid-sized organizations (for example, there are 167,000 such organizations in the U.S. alone). However, the expected price points for solutions are very different, and suppliers will not simply be able to apply solutions appropriate to a Fortune 500 organization to the mid-sized market. In Germany, only 14% of users at mid-sized organizations plan to spend EUR 500,000 or more on ECM solutions, compared to nearly 60% at large organizations. The data is comparable for the UK, 25% vs. 71% and for the U.S., 15% vs. 49%.

Finding: Despite having the most litigious culture in the world, users in the U.S. are not as aware as they should be of the importance of managing electronic information. U.S. users are the least confident, among the countries surveyed, in the integrity of their electronic records. Only 64% of U.S. users consider the process by which electronic information is managed to be "very important" or "quite important" relative to potential future litigation. This contrasts with 95% of German users and 83% of UK users.

Finding: ECM technologies and solutions continue to increase in importance for end-users. The percentage of end-users that have purchase plans exceeding $1 million for ECM technologies rose from 17% in 2003-2004 to 19% in 2004-2005 (among those reporting purchasing intentions).

www.aiim.org/viewpdfa.asp?ID=29815

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