AIIM, the community that provides education, research, and best practices to help organizations find, control, and optimize their information, released new Market Intelligence last week titled "State of the ECM Industry 2010."  It is available for a free download at this link, but you do need to register.  If you are not a member of AIIM, the membership fee is well worth the cost as you have access to statistics such as are presented in this report as well as many other reports and white papers.

I am always interested in research such as this because it provides information about trends in Information Management practices in various organizations.  One item in the report that caught my attention is how the business drivers for ECM have done such an about face in the reports from the last couple of years.  In the years leading up to 2007, the items categorized as Compliance/Risk Avoidance was increasing as a business driver for ECM while the items categorized as Cost/Efficiency were declining. 

With the global economic downtown of the last 12-18 months, the percent of respondents citing Cost/Efficiency as the main business driver has returned to levels from the 2004 report.  The percent of respondents citing Compliance/Risk Avoidance as main business drivers has continued to decline, but it has been more gradual and still about twice what was reported in 2004.  AIIM and others believe that the Compliance/Risk Avoidance driver will increase over the next reporting period since regulatory lapses have been cited as a major reason for the economic downturn.  I will be very interested in watching the Collaboration category as a business driver for ECM.  This hasn't been measured in previous years surveys, but I am certain the increased usage of and interest in Enterprise 2.0 technologies will have a major impact as a business driver.

The survey of AIIM members that the report is based on also included some questions about SharePoint.  SharePoint has been adopted by many organizations as an IT infrastructure platform at some very astounding rates over the last three years as Microsoft has made improvements in the software.  In the last statistics I have seen published, Microsoft claimed $1 Billion in revenues in 2007 was directly attributed to sales of SharePoint.

Another data point included in this report that disturbs me somewhat is the answer to the question, "Which of the following would best describe who is driving and controlling SharePoint sites and applications in your organization?"  While it is great to see that approximately 31% of the respondents indicate it is controlled by IT with input from Records Management, it is disturbing to see about 52% are either controlled by IT with no input from Records Management or it is

managed on a department level.  While 9% say that no one is controlling SharePoint sites, it is comforting to see that they do have rules and policies for site creation and structure.  The survey doesn't provide enough information to know whether those managed at a department level also have rules and policies for site creation and structure, but we have seen implementations that are completely out of control (as 5% indicated in their answer to this question) due to the lack of what many call Information Governance (See previous post on SharePoint Governance at this link.)  Unless SharePoint is being used purely as a portal for a company's Intranet, Records Management should be involved in providing guidance on content that may be records.  At the very least, they should be aware of the types of content being stored in the sites so they can adequately guide Legal and other stakeholders during litigation and the search for relevant electronically stored information (ESI).  Our consultants have spoken on the topic of Information Governance at the first ever SharePoint Saturday Houston event and at previous conferences of the ARMA Houston chapter.

I found one other SharePoint related data point interesting and also supports the previous discussion that there is little governance in many SharePoint implementations.  There were some questions about SharePoint and existing Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems.  The question was "Do you have a formal plan or strategy in place describing where you will utilize your SharePoint investments and where you will utilize other ECM investments?"   

What bothered me is that 46% do not have a formal plan, although they see the need to have one.  Another 12% don't have a plan or even a starting point to develop one.  It leads me to believe that governance around SharePoint implementations is still an after thought for many organizations. 

I'll address other items I found interesting in the survey in subsequent blog posts.  If you haven't seen the survey, it is very much worth reading.  It also covers topics such as Enterprise 2.0 and ECM priorities.  Access Sciences can certainly provide guidance in any of the areas covered in the report.