A visit to the AIIM Roadshow 2009 in London, UK, helped me get a quick update on the state of the ECM industry. Doug Miles gave the key note presentation with results from a recent AIIM survey:

• Focus for investment in 2009 will be on Document Management, portals, Enterprise 2.0, Electronic Records Management and Search
• Document capture, MFPs, OCR, digital mailroom are falling behind in importance
• Software expenditure (i.e. license fees) will be up, services including training (which will harm associations like AIIM) are stagnating
• Most organisations achieve the expected return on investment (ROI) with their ECM investment, in particular with hard $ ROI; but interestinly enough, most overachieve their soft $ ROI – This makes ECM look like a pretty low risk investment compared to some of the other IT initiatives.
• 43% of organisation achieve a payback within 12 month on their document capture and digitisation projects alone!

Doug moved on to discuss Microsoft’s offering for ECM, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS):

• 12% of respondents stated that MOSS is their chosen ECM suite (enterprise wide)
• Collaboration is stated as the top reason to implement MOSS
• Although Enterprise 2.0 and Search are only 8th and 9th on the priority list, with ~25% of respondents working on that
• 5% and 22% of respondents stated that MOSS is compatible or works in parallel to other ECM solutions

We also got a bit of visionary (wishful?!) thinking:

• Focus for ECM should be on creating an “ECM Central”, a central capability as opposed to single purpose solutions
• Drive ECM towards Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) via single sign-on (SSO), open source and open standards
• Provide enterprise search for retrieval across all repositories and systems
• And consider managing assets “in place” as opposed to endless migration efforts from one system to the next
• Interestingly enough, 35% of respondents want to migrate to a single system
• 34% will provide linkage between systems via portals
• and only 9% are considering or implementing enterprise search