AIIM State of the ECM Industry 2009 report yields some suprising results

AIIM came out with its annual industry report called State of the ECM Industry 2009 recently, and it yielded some interesting and surprising results:

• Only 7 percent of those surveyed were using Software as a Service, a much lower number than I would have expected in this economy. SaaS provides a way to make an investment in ECM without worrying about the infrastructure costs and software upgrade issues.
• 28 percent of those surveyed would take more than a month to produce documents in a discovery process, a situation that is untenable and simply puts the organization at risk. Judges will not tolerate this and will not accept excuses when there are so many tools available to help in this regard.
• Along the same lines, a full 55 percent reported that they were not sure that emails were being recorded or retrievable. Again this puts the organization at great risk from a legal standpoint plus they have no control over what they have and what emails could come back to hurt them in a legal process.
• SMS/text messages, blogs and wikis are "off the corporate radar" for a whopping 75 percent of organizations. This number is just too hard to believe. Does it mean that organizations don't use them or that they are simply ignoring them as a piece of content that needs to be managed?
• In spite of all the ROI talk at least week's AIIM 2009 conference (as I wrote in Recession Casts a Long Shadow Over AIIM 2009), only 52 percent of respondents actually ever bothered to take before and after pictures to measure hard dollar returns on content management investments, a number I find shockingly low.
• In spite of the prevalence of solutions suites, only 25 percent get basic content management services including DM, RM and BPM from a single vendor. 

It's worth noting that this report was underwritten by EMC, Open Text, Oracle and Allyis. The survey was conducted earlier this year between February and March and involved 568 members of the AIIM community of organizations of various sizes. You can download the report for free at the AIIM website. Note that it requires registration.

For more information:
Download the full report

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