Industry analysts peer into their crystal ball

At Gilbane's 2009 Content Management conference in Boston last week, a panel of industry analysts sat down to look back on the trends of 2009 and make predictions on the direction of content management in 2010.

The panelists agreed one of the biggest issues for 2009 was user-generated content. How can companies promote enterprise social networking and information flow without being overly controlling? How might enterprise collaboration help with knowledge capture considering the retiring workforce? Most companies do not have clear policies in this area or a clear plan as to how such tools can help move the company forward.

"In social networking it's connection-oriented," said Guy Creese, VP and research director of collaboration and content strategies at Burton Group. "That's why we see the interest from HR and those attempting to contact experts." The real issue is finding those gurus within a company and making sure that they're not incorrectly excluded from an employee's information search because they don't have a certain title.

"Searching for information and not finding it is a huge, huge time sink for the information worker...[ideally employees should be] finding content through people--finding a trusted source and connecting to their content picks," explained Melissa Webster, vice president of content and digital media technologies at IDC.

The panel agreed that moving toward successful enterprise social networking and social search will continue to be a focus in 2010 because so few companies have reached that goal. The panel also talked about the need for analysts to help companies mitigate their risk when migrating data and making huge changes to their systems. In a market that is constantly morphing and M&A-focused this is especially important.

"I think you have to brace yourself for the fact that you may buy software form a company that will be acquired," said Stephen Powers, senior analyst for Forrester Research.

"Look at your problem as a data-centric problem, not as a platform-centric problem...If I can always use the same data then I can move it around to different systems," said Dale Waldt, Senior analyst with Gilbane Group. "Everybody's processes are constrained by the tools...I would try to shift away from dependency on a platform."

The consolidation and upheaval in the content management space is not really new, but Waldt feels the direction of the marketplace will become clearer soon. Kathleen Reidy, senior analyst with 451 Group believes globalization will be critical in dictating the direction of the industry, as will the cloud. "We keep waiting for cloud-based, SaaS-based WCM to take off because it seems like such a natural fit," she said. Maybe the new year will ring in big steps forward in the cloud space.