ECM Users of 2014
Wishing all of you a very happy and productive 2014. Hope the new year has been treating you very well so far. It’s been only 9 days, but there are innumerable articles and posts already out there that predict what is in store for ECM in 2014.
The predicted trends include:
- Hybrid cloud-based ECM
- Content apps that automate workflow
- Integration with business applications
- Anytime anywhere content access
- Thrust on information governance
- Gravitation towards better user experience
- Business and content analytics taking the pole position
- Management of content explosion aka Big Content
- File Sync and share from desktop and mobile devices
- Data privacy issues primary attributed to BYOD
- The run of the mill compliance issues
- Slow demise of ECM (at least the term ECM!)
These are all topics that warrant immense discussions and debates. However, I am more interested in looking at how ECM (or rather enterprise content) will be used in 2014.
In my opinion trends are driven more by users than technology, especially in the ECM space. Cloud and Mobile have been around for a while, but whole-hearted adoption has not happened. The chance of an earth shattering shakeup in the ECM segment is quite slim at least in 2014. ECM has been a steady, slow, boring, nice to have solution since its initial days. And I don’t see a reason why it will change now. So what is paramount for ECM this year and may be in the coming years will be the behaviours of its potential users.
I would like to classify the ECM users (it could apply to other solution areas too!) into four groups: Casual, Cautious, Conservative, and Stubborn. This classification is applicable to individual users or organizations.
Casual: The casual users are quick adopters of technology. Their idea is to get things done and use the latest and greatest options available. These are users who would sync their desktop or mobile files to Dropbox or SkyDrive and share them with colleagues or business partners, use Skype extensively for business calls and meetings, and use Gmail for business. Typically such small and medium business users like the user experience provided by these cloud/mobile services. And for sure they stay as far away from the traditional ECM solutions as possible.
Cautious: This set of customers use a well-defined set of guidelines for accessing cloud based ECM or file sharing services. They are not averse to use a cloud based solution, but at the same time are concerned about the security and privacy of their content. They typically use Office 365, or Alfresco on Cloud or even the business level services of Dropbox or Box. The customers or users come predominantly from the small and medium businesses and sometime certain departments within a larger enterprise. The priorities for these customers are efficiency and productivity without compromising content security.
Conservative: Most of the large enterprises fall under the conservative bucket where they will have rigid data security policies and enforcement mechanisms. These customers are typically averse to a public cloud based ECM system. These enterprises predominantly look for in-house deployment of ECM systems. Their ECM choices are typically limited to the top 5 or 6 vendors and use top of the line system integrators to get simple ECM implementations! The end user preferences for user experience or productivity enhancements always take a back seat with these customers where the criteria is often driven by IT and information security. These customers spend a lot of money of the systems but often lag very far in adopting newer trends.
Stubborn: These are large organizations who refuse to change. They may not even use an ECM system. They are pretty happy with their file shares and paper stacks. Many governments out there in the world fall into this category. Productivity and user engagement are not the priorities for them.
As far as ECM and new trends are concerned, the majority of the spend power is with the Conservatives and Stubborns. They either don’t spend or take too long to spend. I personally don’t see too much of a change 2014 will bring to the nature of user behaviour. So the market in my opinion will remain more or less the same. The progresses driven by the Casuals and Cautious may not be able to create ripples in the ECM market this year.
#ECM 