IDC 1575
I D C A N A L Y S T C O N N E C T I O N
Melissa Webster
Program Vice President, Content and Digital Media Technologies
T h e F u t u r e o f E n t e r p r i s e C o n t e n t M a n a g e m e n t :
F i v e E C M T r e n d s i n 2 0 1 4
December 2013
The amount of unstructured information — content — in the enterprise continues to grow at a rapid pace. The need to manage all of this content and put it to use in the context of enterprise business processes has been an important driver for the adoption of enterprise content management (ECM) over the past few years. More recently, the shift to what IDC calls the "3rd Platform" — the
intersection of cloud, mobile, social, and big data — is creating a number of new requirements and opportunities for ECM.
Alfresco posed the following question to Melissa Webster, vice president of IDC's Content and Digital Media Technologies research, on behalf of Alfresco's enterprise customers.
Q. What do you see as the key trends for ECM in 2014?
A. Key ECM themes to watch for in the coming year include: hybrid ECM, content apps,
integration of ECM with business applications, mobility, and governance. Let's start with hybrid ECM and the need to connect cloud collaboration services to enterprise content management.
Hybrid ECM
We believe 2014 is the year ECM and cloud-based file sync and share services will come together in hybrid ECM solutions. Hybrid ECM solutions resolve the apparent conflict between the needs of users and the needs of the organization around content collaboration, and we can expect to see most ECM vendors endeavor to offer some form of hybrid ECM, whether they build internally, acquire, or leverage partner solutions.
Cloud file sync and share services have sprung up to address two important unmet needs. First, users need an easy way to share files with their external collaborators; for example, by creating a team site and inviting their collaborators to share project files. Without an easy way to share with external stakeholders, users are forced back into email as the "lowest common denominator" mechanism for ensuring everyone on the team has access to the content — and into what many have called "revision hell," as it becomes very challenging to manage and keep track of all the versions of project documents.
mobile field workers such as salespeople, insurance adjusters, in-home healthcare workers, and others who need to bring up relevant documents in the context of a business process. These two needs — external sharing and mobility — have driven rapid user self-adoption of cloud file sync and share services, and — increasingly — IT organizations are picking up support for these services as usage grows. Generally, usage tends to grow fairly virally, and IT organizations have recognized the need to standardize on a solution that is "enterprise class."
Interestingly, however, support has often fallen — so far, at least — to an IT group that is responsible for desktop support, application development, FTP servers, or collaboration services rather than the SharePoint team or the ECM group. In fact, the SharePoint and ECM teams are typically left out of the loop altogether despite the fact that what users are
uploading is enterprise content — content that may be sensitive in nature, that may need to be managed in accordance with regulatory compliance controls, or that merely needs to be shared more broadly with the organization's other employees to improve organizational knowledge and effectiveness.
Indeed, groups that are chartered with ensuring enterprise content is managed properly have every reason to be concerned about the management of content on cloud file sync and share services. They've "seen this movie" before with the explosive growth of user-deployed SharePoint team sites; they've watched as users have spun up hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of SharePoint team sites over the years, and they are acutely aware of the challenges around managing all that content through its life cycle.
We think 2014 will see these (currently) disconnected IT domains start to come together as ECM vendors offer hybrid solutions that combine the benefits of cloud content collaboration with on-premise enterprise content management and governance. A hybrid ECM solution gives cloud file sync and share the enterprise content management back end it needs to ensure enterprise content is properly managed; and it extends ECM to the cloud, to external users, and to mobile devices. This will reinvigorate ECM for collaboration, which was an important use case for ECM before the rise of SharePoint. In addition, it will enable ECM to support the increasingly mobile extended enterprise.
Content Apps
Content applications automate the many document-intensive business processes that are found in every organization. These are business processes, or workflows in a larger business process, that the organization's enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), human capital management (HCM) and other common enterprise applications don't address. Some are horizontal line-of-business (LOB) apps such as invoice processing, sales order processing, and employee information management. Others are vertical industry specific such as insurance claims processing, loan origination, patient information management, clinical trials management, government entitlements management, investigative case management, student records management, engineering change
management, and warranty claims management.
These are mission-critical business processes, but because they are driven by information in documents, they have often been challenging to automate — in part because these
through the various workflows required to complete business process tasks, configuring the user interface, and providing business process status and reporting.
Typically, content apps facilitate a human decisioning process of some sort, and a good percentage of them follow a common pattern we call case management. Case management apps manage a dossier for a "case" or "matter" from inception through various stages of completion (with notifications and alerts along the way to remind participants to furnish missing documents or information) through that ad hoc or human decisioning process and then serve as documentation or evidence for the decision itself — not only what the outcome was but also the reasoning behind it. Case management–style applications also aid in business process transformation because the reporting they offer gives process owners full visibility into the effectiveness (or lack of effectiveness!) of their process and the insight they need to improve it. There's a case management aspect to transactional apps too; for example, exception handling in invoice processing.
Over the past few years, ECM vendors have built out case management frameworks that enable rapid development of these applications, enabling organizations and also independent software vendors (ISVs) to bring automation and much greater visibility to these processes. That's important because often the ad hoc human decisioning processes are more
consequential.
Integration with Business Applications
ECM supports business applications in a couple of ways. First, the case management/decisioning apps — and also the transactional content apps such as invoice processing — often bridge a gap in the organization's enterprise applications, and by bridging that gap they significantly improve the end-to-end process visibility of those enterprise applications. The ECM system needs to be able to both pull information from those other applications and push information to them to accomplish this.
Then, there's the pervasive content management aspect. What we usually find when we speak with customers about their ECM implementation is that content silos exist all over the organization. Every enterprise application has its own local document store. The documents in those local repositories aren't available to everyone who needs them, or to cross-functional business processes, so there's an adverse impact on information worker productivity. In addition, there's a compliance impact: There's no centralized repository that can ensure content is governed and managed consistently, that records are declared as required, that content is deleted or moved to an archive at the end of the retention period, and so forth. Content silos also increase storage costs (because there is potentially a lot of duplication) and eDiscovery costs.
Moving the content out of those captive document silos to the ECM system addresses all of these issues, and it also makes the content available to new users who didn't have access to those business applications. To accomplish this, however, the ECM system must readily integrate with the organization's various business applications and in a completely
transparent way so the users aren't impacted. Users need to be able to call up the required documents with a single click in the context of their current task, without learning a new user interface.
for all of them — even if they all exposed their functionality via APIs (and the organization's legacy custom apps often don't). There will always be situations, however, where APIs are required. Organizations need to choose an ECM vendor that offers both mechanisms.
Mobility
Users want to remain productive while they're on the go, and that means they need to be able to access their documents and participate in workflows using their mobile devices. Up to now, we've seen somewhat limited ECM capabilities on mobile devices: Mobile apps, for example, have focused mainly on notifications and approvals. Those apps are valuable, but in 2014, we'll see mobile capabilities expand significantly, driven by user needs.
Here are some examples. Field workers need to be able to run full-function content apps on their mobile devices. ECM solutions that provide mobile clients give organizations the platform they need to deliver these apps. Users also need access to their documents, and responsive Web design provides this functionality. ECM vendors are rolling out HTML5 user interfaces that make browser-based access from different devices a good experience. Users also need to be able to continue to work when they lack an Internet connection (i.e., in offline mode). They need relevant content automatically synced to their device(s), and ECM vendors are starting to address this too.
Of course, for collaboration, hybrid ECM is a great answer, and we've already touched on that. It's a big part of the mobile story for ECM, and we'll see widespread adoption in the coming year.
Information Governance
We believe that information governance is becoming a strategic initiative in large enterprises, and it will be a hot topic in 2014. Today, organizations are basically keeping everything because they're afraid to throw anything away. The downside of not throwing anything away is increased storage and eDiscovery costs; difficulty finding relevant, high-value information — separating the wheat from the chaff, essentially; and increased business and/or
compliance risk. Of course, organizations can face stiff penalties when they delete
information they are required to keep, and in some cases, they've actually been held liable when they retained information they could have deleted.
The sheer amount of enterprise information that needs to be governed continues to grow. We also have many new content sources and types that need governance. Email used to be the elephant in the room on that score; now it's social, and particularly in the extended enterprise, it's social in the context of business partners, customers, and suppliers too. Organizations need a "defensible disposition" strategy, but relatively few have one today, so we think this is another big area of opportunity for ECM. A relatively small percentage of ECM adopters have deployed a records management solution. Regulated industries, of course, have been the primary adopters, but even in regulated industries, records management hasn't been as broadly deployed as it could be. Organizations in every industry should be thinking about it.
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