News Feature | May 13, 2015

AIIM: Is The "ECM Era" About To End?

Christine Kern

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

AIIM: Is The “ECM Era” About To End?

Consumerization, the expansion of cloud and mobile capabilities, and the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) is creating an explosion of content and information that will require a new “post-ECM” Era by 2020. AIIM, the global community of information professionals, bases this conclusion on two new reports.

In a survey of 434 organizations, AIIM’s ECM Decisions Industry Watch report states (enterprise content management/document management) ECM/DM is considered mission critical for more most organizations, and one-third of respondents say just an hour of downtime translates to serious disruption. In addition, 75 percent of survey respondents indicate ECM/RM is a fundamental part of security initiatives.

“There is no doubt that organizations still require their content to be managed properly, but the term ‘ECM’ is past its prime as a description of the revolution that is being driven by mobile, analytics, cloud and collaborative technologies,” AIIM President John Mancini states in the press release. “The ECM industry is in need of a new label and organizations are desperate for best practices to deal with the technology disruption that is occurring.”

The executive summary of the second report, The Content Management 2020: Thinking Beyond ECM Trendscape, states, “The forecast for 2020: ECM as we know it will be gone.” The report’s authors explain that content management will become “increasingly invisible,” and a new industry label is needed.

“Organizations have always wrestled with how to manage the intersection of people, processes, and information, and over the past fifteen years we have called this set of technologies Enterprise Content Management, or ECM,” said AIIM President John Mancini. “But that time is almost over and we are entering a new era of ‘ECM’, that will more accurately reflect the changing landscape.”

AIIM’s report predicts the following trends for 2020 and advises that they be included in planning.

  • New approaches to privacy and security
  • Ubiquitous broadband connectivity
  • Bottom-up rather than top-down innovation
  • Lots more virtual and distributed work
  • A shortage of “connective” and analytic skills among IT staffs
  • A shift in how technology is purchased from multi-year capital expenditures to current year operating expenditures
  • Increased regulation of the cloud by national governments