8 Major Trends That Will Change ECM in the Coming Years

Posted on Aug 5, 2010 in Records Management News

August 03, 2010

Enter­prise con­tent man­age­ment is already com­posed of a com­plex, broad set of ideas and tech­nolo­gies — over the next 5 years, a con­ver­gence of trends across mul­ti­ple soft­ware cat­e­gories will have a mas­sive impact on this space. This list is by no means exhaus­tive, as ven­dors will also need to deal with evolv­ing chal­lenges around secu­rity, reten­tion, work­flow, cap­ture, and other aspects of ECM, but the fol­low­ing eight trends will fun­da­men­tally change how we build and deploy con­tent man­age­ment solutions:

8 Major Trends That Will Change ECM in the Com­ing Years

1 — Cloud, Cloud, Cloud.

We’re at the begin­ning of a shift from on-premise solu­tions to cloud-based plat­forms, thanks to the cost effi­cien­cies and shorter deploy­ment times that come with deliv­er­ing con­tent man­age­ment over the web. But the cloud is much more than just a new form of deliv­ery; merely mov­ing today’s enter­prise con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems to a hosted envi­ron­ment will only achieve incre­men­tal ben­e­fits. Ven­dors now have the oppor­tu­nity to rethink and rein­vent the con­tent man­age­ment mar­ket, lever­ag­ing the real-time power of the web and build­ing pow­er­ful, elas­tic plat­forms that can scale up and down to address the needs of For­tune 500 com­pa­nies and small busi­nesses alike. Today, most ven­dors sell cloud solu­tions as a sep­a­rate prod­uct line that’s miss­ing much of the core func­tion­al­ity of their client-server offer­ings, but tech­nolo­gies like HTML5 will enable ven­dors to build richer, more inter­ac­tive web appli­ca­tions that can bet­ter address busi­nesses’ mas­sive infor­ma­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion challenges.

2 — Mobile Content.

Today’s work­force is more mobile than ever before, and con­tent man­age­ment ven­dors need to give users access to con­tent across mobile devices to enable col­lab­o­ra­tion and pro­duc­tiv­ity any­time, any­where. Work­ers should be able to view and share files on their iPhones, Black­ber­ries, or Android phones. They should be able to engage more inti­mately with con­tent on devices like the iPad — com­ment­ing on the lat­est ver­sion of a pre­sen­ta­tion or pass­ing around sales col­lat­eral at a meet­ing. And to truly empower pro­duc­tiv­ity on-the-go, con­tent man­age­ment ven­dors should also look to inte­grate with other mobile pro­duc­tiv­ity appli­ca­tions, so that users can access and engage with con­tent from within mobile appli­ca­tions like Quick­Of­fice or Doc­u­ments To Go.

3 — Redefin­ing “Content.”

Data­base and Platform-as-a-Service solu­tions are going to drive a whole new def­i­n­i­tion of what we think of as con­tent. Ven­dors will need to deter­mine how unstruc­tured and struc­tured con­tent can coex­ist in this new world. Busi­nesses will pro­duce a tremen­dous amount of infor­ma­tion that needs to be con­nected to other classes of data in mean­ing­ful ways — for exam­ple, invoices need to be man­aged along­side con­tracts and cus­tomers records in Sales­force. This mix­ture of data types is going to pro­duce an explo­sion of inter­est­ing apps and plat­forms to help man­age and manip­u­late this infor­ma­tion, and in the process our def­i­n­i­tion of “con­tent” will change dramatically.

4 — Open Platforms.

Con­tent is most valu­able when it is acces­si­ble across rel­e­vant plat­forms, whether on-premise or web-based. After all, if users are work­ing within Sales­force or Net­Suite, shouldn’t they be able to access rel­e­vant sales col­lat­eral with­out hav­ing to open a sep­a­rate appli­ca­tion? Today, inte­gra­tions with tra­di­tional enter­prise con­tent man­age­ment solu­tions are com­plex, lengthy, and require sig­nif­i­cant resources from IT depart­ments or third-party experts. As cloud-based con­tent man­age­ment becomes more preva­lent, we’ll see the indus­try move towards open­ness, where rich, open APIs enable easy inte­gra­tions with other sys­tems, and stan­dards like CMIS pro­mote data migra­tion and enable con­tent man­age­ment solu­tions to talk to each other.

5 — Search Everywhere.

In the past decade, Google has unequiv­o­cally proven how impor­tant search is to our lives. Most of all our activ­i­ties involve a search func­tion either at the start of a process or as a foun­da­tional ele­ment to pow­er­ing other fea­tures and func­tions . Search will be every­where, and we’ll see ser­vices emerge just to help you search your cloud infor­ma­tion and enter­prise con­tent. Microsoft cer­tainly thought so when it bought FAST. All of Google’s prod­ucts have tightly inte­grated search. At Box, we try to cre­ate as much con­tent work­flow through a search con­text as pos­si­ble; dis­cov­ery, nav­i­ga­tion, col­lab­o­ra­tion, and mobil­ity are all enhanced sig­nif­i­cantly by pow­er­ful search capabilities.

6 — Col­lab­o­ra­tion & Globalization.

Today’s orga­ni­za­tions need to be able to do more than store and man­age mas­sive amounts of infor­ma­tion — they also need to empower end user col­lab­o­ra­tion around this con­tent. We’re now shar­ing with col­leagues, ven­dors, and clients through­out the world, and sim­ple and pow­er­ful tools that help busi­nesses share are cre­at­ing a much more con­nected and pro­duc­tive world. Com­pa­nies like Jive and Intralinks have demon­strated that there is a seri­ous demand for col­lab­o­ra­tion tech­nolo­gies in the enter­prise, and con­tent man­age­ment ven­dors that seam­lessly inte­grate work­flow and col­lab­o­ra­tion tools within their prod­ucts will enhance the value of that con­tent. Fur­ther­more, cloud-based con­tent man­age­ment solu­tions can lever­age the power of the web to deliver real-time col­lab­o­ra­tion fea­tures, such as con­cur­rent in-document edit­ing, or real-time dis­cus­sion threads around files.

7 — Social Intelligence.

Social is cer­tainly the sex­i­est trend in enter­prise soft­ware today. Prod­ucts across soft­ware cat­e­gories are tak­ing a cue from ser­vices like Face­book and Twit­ter and incor­poat­ing more social ele­ments, and con­tent man­age­ment shouldn’t be an excep­tion. Share­point 2010 is loaded with social fea­tures, Box con­nects users to rel­e­vant peo­ple, con­tent and con­ver­sa­tions, and ser­vices like Jive and Sales­force Chat­ter help busi­nesses share infor­ma­tion on top of a social archi­tec­ture. Con­tent man­age­ment ven­dors can lever­age social rec­om­men­da­tions and dis­cov­ery to sur­face impor­tant busi­ness con­tent much more quickly, show­case real-time activ­i­ties in news feeds to pro­vide a more holis­tic view of what’s hap­pen­ing in an orga­ni­za­tion, and aggre­gate insights into how con­tent is being used.

8 — Big Data.

With EMC’s recent acqui­si­tion of Green­plum, the con­cept of Big Data is start­ing to get a lot more atten­tion from the larger enter­prise soft­ware and hard­ware ven­dors. A data explo­sion is inevitable, and we’re going to have to start to make sense of all this infor­ma­tion that’s being cre­ated. We’re also going to need sys­tems to help man­age all of this infor­ma­tion, and our cur­rent soft­ware and hard­ware archi­tec­ture likely won’t cut it. Finally, culling intel­li­gence from struc­tured and unstruc­tured con­tent is going to pro­vide mas­sive oppor­tu­ni­ties across indus­tries like Finance, Retail, Health­care, Sci­ence, and more.

—

Aaron Levie is the CEO and co-founder of Box.net, which he launched in 2005 with the goal of help­ing peo­ple to access, col­lab­o­rate, and share all their con­tent online. Based in Palo Alto, Box.net has since grown into a lead­ing Cloud Con­tent Man­age­ment solu­tion for almost 4 mil­lion users and com­pa­nies rang­ing from small busi­nesses to For­tune 100 com­pa­nies. At Box, Aaron focuses on prod­uct and plat­form strat­egy, incor­po­rat­ing the best of tra­di­tional con­tent man­age­ment with the most effec­tive ele­ments of social busi­ness software.

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