Forrester ECM report suggests 2010 could be a big year for ECM

Last Fall Stephen Powers at Forrester surveyed 170 "information and knowledge management professionals." What he found, in a report released earlier this month, should put a smile on the faces of content management vendors everywhere as we head into 2010. For starters, a whopping 72 percent of those surveyed will increase deployment or usage of enterprise content management products. It's a funny way of phrasing it, so it's hard to know exactly what the words mean, but it would suggest purchasing more ECM fire power to deal with the increasing amounts of content inside organizations.

What's more interesting is how that breaks down with half of respondents reporting they will invest in Web Content Management, records management and digital asset management. More respondents were willing to deal with DAM in a service model than other forms of content management. Powers speculates this is because a lot of these assets are external facing and that makes sense. Respondents were more wary about records management in the cloud, which I found to be true as well when I went to the ARMA conference in November.

But just because the respondents could be looking to spend money, it doesn't mean they aren't still looking for a return on investment (as we learned last spring at the AIIM conference in Philadelphia). Almost half said cost and implementation were most problematic in proving ROI and over 40 percent blamed the vendor for creating unreasonable expectations. But many did not shy away from blaming internal problems proving as we speculated in "Is the vendor solely responsible for WCM project failure?" that there are a complex confluence of factors that contribute to the failure of a project.

Not surprising, SharePoint is a huge factor, even if it remains an engima for these professionals--which fits in with what I wrote last winter in "SharePoint's hard to define, but you can't ignore Microsoft as an ECM player." One surprise to me was that there seemed to be tepid interest in open source solutions, which seems counter to some of the information about the interest in such solutions at the Gilbane Conference earlier this month.

The survey shows, at the very least that there are issues to be resolved that haven't gone away, that ROI is still important (as is proving it) and that there is a clear market need for ECM inside organizations. As we look forward to 2010, that bodes well for the industry, but vendors need to continue to try to solve the problems that have plagued ECM implementation in the past and work to make it a smoother and more cost-effective process moving forward.

For more information:
- see the survey page on Forrester.com

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Is the vendor solely responsible for WCM failure?
SharePoint's hard to define, but you can't ignore Microsoft as an ECM player
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