Gartner predicts recent troubles in financial services will lead to more regulatory compliance

Monday was a disaster on Wall Street. Financial services firms continued to get pummeled in the wake of the mortgage crisis and Wall Street responded with a 500-plus point plunge that the Boston Globe [1] dubbed "Black Monday." What does this have to do with content management? Well, it could have a lot to do with it if Gartner [2] is right when it says that the recent troubles on Wall Street could lead to increased regulation that could actually dwarf the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations that were enacted in the wake of the Enron scandal.  Many companies were introduced to enterprise content management because Sarbanes-Oxley forced them to manage their content better, or face serious consequences. In fact, ECM was closely related to regulatory compliance for much of this decade until more recently, when ECM began to shift toward social networking, knowledge sharing and collaboration.

This level of regulation, if it comes to pass, could transform the content management industry yet again, or expand a niche that had taken a back seat to collaboration and knowledge sharing. When you combine that with the news last week about the CMIS content management standard [3], it could bode very well for the future of the content management industry. Able to sell on several fronts, and bolstered by a standard that opens up disparate content repositories, we might be looking at an enterprise content management renaissance, with your company possibly looking at an increased need in content management services.

For more:
- read this ChannelWeb article [4]
- check out this NetworkWorld article [5]