Report Overview:
When the term Enterprise Content Management was first coined some 7 or 8 years ago, the objective was the same as it is today - to bring all of an organization’s unstructured content into a managed environment for sharing, controlled access, find-ability and archive.
The vision then was to provide a single repository, accessible by all staff, capable of dealing with all kinds of content, servicing business processes across the organization, and providing a single, secure records archive with managed disposition. The obvious parallel was in the ERP and CRM systems that were already established as enterprise applications.
To this end, the document management and records management vendors of that time set out on a path to become ECM vendors by equipping their products with modules to cover every type of content and content process, either by organic growth, or more frequently by acquisition.
Today, however, there is a general appreciation that ECM is more of a blanket term to cover information management technologies for unstructured content. In some organizations, it may indeed be a single system capable of dealing appropriately with many different types of content and records requirements. In others, it may be a collection of repositories and applications. The common goal, however, is to provide users with a single-access capability allowing them to find, retrieve and process information from wherever it is stored, without needing to login to multiple applications. Increasingly, underlying content services infrastructures have emerged as a base for content management solutions and business process applications.
The theme of this report is to explore to what extent users are achieving this goal, how they are achieving it, what effect collaboration solutions such as Microsoft SharePoint are having on their view of how to do it, and what their spending plans are within the different areas of ECM.
We will also reflect upon the drivers and motivations for improved content management, and the degree to which return on investment is being achieved.
Download the Full AIIM State of the ECM Industry 2009 Report
