Five trends from AIIM 2010

When you spend time at a show like AIIM 2010, it's hard not to notice trends. I've joked that the vendors get together every year and work out a playbook before the show and decide what to focus on. Of course, they don't (at least I don't think they do), but it's always interesting to see what vendors are discussing. For whatever reason, there always seems to be some common themes.

This year I kept hearing about these:

1. Focus on the user

It may seem completely obvious to focus on the user, but there was a lot of talk about concentrating on how people actually use these products. The idea being that the sale should be less technically focused on back-end processes and more on how it helps people do their job. Whether the front end is more or less important than the back end is open to debate, but I was hearing a lot about this.

2. Business process is very important

Again, nothing earth shattering there, but vendors do seem to be focused very keenly on the idea that the products have to solve real business problems that matter to lines of business. The message I was hearing was that content management had to show that it solves real issues these companies face every day (and that's a positive focus for vendors to be having).

3. Create off-the-shelf components with common use cases

Customers want these products to include pre-configured common use cases out of the box. They are tired of expensive customization and the long development cycles associated with that. They want to pull something off the shelf and modify it in small ways to match their company's ways of doing business, so they can roll out solutions faster and less expensively.

4. Offer services instead of monolithic packages

A related idea to #3 is the idea of offering a set of services that companies can pick and choose from. This may be more common with cloud offerings, but these services (like the SpringCM model) enable customers to purchase the services they need and then expand as their requirements change over time. This means customers don't have to buy a huge package with services they will never use.

5. More companies need to take governance seriously

Even though it's not a new discussion (including in this newsletter), many companies still do not have a records management solution in place to deal with governance issues around legal and regulatory requirements. There was a lot of focus on the idea that companies need to take this aspect of content management much more seriously than they currently do. It is actually a valid point. Companies leave themselves vulnerable if they haven't implemented a systematic, defined records management methodology across the enterprise.

Related Articles:
More coverage from AIIM 2010 
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Business process management keeps things flowing
HP launches updated SharePoint governance tool
Content management and compliance
eDiscovery could be next target for ECM vendors