Crystal Ball Gazing … Enterprise Content Management 2020 Records Management

Posted on Apr 27, 2010 in Records Management News

Crys­tal Ball Gaz­ing … Enter­prise Con­tent Man­age­ment 2020
Records Management

With a few big ECM related announce­ments over the past cou­ple of weeks … Microsoft Share­Point 2010 and IBM Advanced Case Man­age­ment top­ping the list, I thought I would do a lit­tle crys­tal ball gaz­ing and set my sights on the future. This is always fun and a bit risky at the same time. Con­sider Thomas J. Wat­son, Sr. who despite very scant evi­dence is widely cred­ited with say­ing (in 1943): “I think there is a world mar­ket for maybe five com­put­ers”. I supp­pose we’ll never know for sure if Wat­son said it or not, but despite the risk of being wrong, I share my per­spec­tive on what ECM will look like in 10 years.

In today’s ECM … You find the doc­u­ment you need The Doc­u­ment is King ECM as we know it today started as a way to con­trol paper and evolved to elec­tronic doc­u­ments. From there it grew into some­thing that could sup­port the doc­u­ment shar­ing and cre­ation processes and then into elec­tronic busi­ness process cre­ation, man­age­ment and opti­miza­tion. It has increas­ingly been enhanced and expanded in a num­ber ways … most notably with bet­ter search, process and com­pli­ance tech­nolo­gies. Even today, nearly 30 years after the found­ing of FileNet (who is largely cred­ited for invent­ing the indus­try in the 1980s), the doc­u­ment is the cen­ter of the uni­verse with every­thing else in sup­port­ing roles.

It’s become so easy to cre­ate and share doc­u­ments we’ve lost a crit­i­cal value point along the way … the con­text. End­less hours are spent search­ing for doc­u­ments with­out the abil­ity to know which ver­sions are trusted and are an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the busi­ness con­text. We’re at a tip­ping point of a busi­ness real­iza­tion and con­tent util­ity – while crit­i­cal to the suc­cess of a busi­ness, a doc­u­ment is still only a com­mu­ni­ca­tion medium use­ful for the abil­ity to track think­ing and pro­vide his­tor­i­cal value. A doc­u­ment is a form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, not the end goal of a busi­ness. Work­ers, in their roles, are what sup­ports the end goal of busi­ness today.

Suc­cess­ful busi­nesses and their employ­ees need tech­nol­ogy to sup­port their roles and to enable deliv­erly of sav­ings and new rev­enue. Today … these same work­ers are expected to pro­duce results AND man­age / find doc­u­ments. This dynamic will change over the next 10 years, dri­ven in part by advances in col­lab­o­ra­tive, social, case man­age­ment and other ECM related technologies.

The Con­text (or worker role) is King In 2020 … The doc­u­ment you need finds you. ECM will evolve and min­i­mally exist as we under­stand it today. The con­cept of ECM will have changed because it’s no longer about “con­tent,” rather it’s “worker role” or “con­text” as the cen­tral plan­ning aspect. ECM as we knew it in 2010, will have become more than con­tent repos­i­to­ries, process, records and search­ing. Work­ers, and their busi­ness roles are the cen­tral aspect, with all processes and com­mu­ni­ca­tion flows either inputs our out­puts in con­text to these roles. Some exam­ples are: * Inbound and out­bound com­mu­ni­ca­tion are expanded to include voice and text from any source (uni­fied com­mu­ni­ca­tions becomes table-stakes).
* Processes are defined, devel­oped and opti­mized around sup­port­ing role exe­cu­tion.
* Com­pos­ite infor­ma­tion dash­boards are the inter­face across sys­tems and processes and deliver in-business-context infor­ma­tion on demand.
* Infor­ma­tion is orga­nized, trusted, proac­tively man­aged and self described.
* Cer­tain basic ECM prob­lems have been “fixed” and no longer top pri­or­ity ECM issues (reten­tion, dis­po­si­tion, eDis­cov­ery, search result qual­ity).
* Insti­tu­tional knowl­edge is man­aged as knowl­edge, not doc­u­ments.
* Con­tent Ana­lyt­ics is the norm where Ontolo­gies describe trusted seman­tic rela­tion­ships from both inter­nal and exter­nal infor­ma­tion sources.
* Processes and sys­tem inter­ac­tions become truly dynamic and can “learn” from his­tor­i­cal exe­cu­tion to rec­om­mend stream­lin­ing options.
* On-premise, appli­ance, cloud and hybrid deliv­ery mod­els all inter­op­er­ate and are invis­i­ble to end-users.

I could go on for pages but if any­thing remotely like this crys­tal ball vision comes true … the impli­ca­tions for all ECMers are sig­nif­i­cant. Tech­nolo­gies like Microsoft Share­Point, IBM Lotus Quickr, IBM Advanced Case Man­age­ment, IBM Con­tent Ana­lyt­ics are amomng those that will drive the next gen­er­a­tion of ECM usage and adop­tion within busi­ness con­text of busi­nesses, processes, work­ers and roles. Time will tell if I am right or not. In the mean time, leave me your feed­back … what does ECM look like in 2020 in your crys­tal ball? I’d love to see what every­one else thinks about the future of ECM (right or wrong) … after all it was the same Thomas Wat­son who said: ”The way to suc­ceed is to dou­ble your error rate”.

author/publisher Craig Rhine­hart
Direc­tor, ECM Prod­uct Strat­egy at IBM

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