Last week I wrote about some broad trends causing major shifts in the ECM market (in "Could we be witnessing the end of ECM as we've known it"). Tony Byrne from Real Story Group reacted to my piece by saying I got the big pieces right, but I failed to account for what he called "prosaic document imaging/management/records management." Interestingly enough, I was at the annual MIT CIO conference last week and spoke to Mark Forman, a partner from KPMG who consults with the federal government (and who was recently interviewed by sister-site FierceGovernmentIT). Forman said increasingly he's seeing business processes, essentially document management functions, being done in the cloud, and he thinks it won't be long before this is the norm.

Is the enterprise ready for RM in the cloud?

Before we get too far with Forman's comments, let's step back in time, way back to last Fall at ARMA where I attended a session run by Alan Pelz-Sharpe of Real Story Group called "Weathering the storm--The future impact of cloud computing on records management." At the time, I wrote that the consensus was that there was no real precedent for records management in the cloud and that the idea scared record keepers to no end. While Pelz-Sharpe did point out some benefits of cloud computing, the panelists weren't terribly bullish about the idea because it was unclear who owned your data and who was responsible should a regulator or court order appear on your door step asking for specific information.

Fast forward to spring 2010

Forman is not as concerned with the details because he said transaction processing is going on in the cloud right now every day. In fact, when the federal government implemented recovery.gov, it began processing the very kind of transactions in the cloud, that those records managers at ARMA were so afraid of. Forman says he's beginning to see the walls coming down for many transaction-based processes. He believes we are witnessing a transition from client-server computing to Software as a Service computing and he predicts these services will become increasingly commoditized.

Commoditizing business transaction processing

There's that word again, the same one we saw popping up as a broader general ECM trend in last week's column. It could be that we are seeing the same type of transformation going on at the business transaction-processing level. Forman says you can take a paper bill, electronic fax, electronic form or data entry feed and service companies like Esker, One Network and CloudInvoicing.com will accept the appropriate type of content, ingest it into the appropriate application and take the necessary action, whether that's generating an invoice, paying a bill or whatever financial transaction you need done. Forman refers to this as "Business Transactions as a Service" and he sees it as a big content/records management trend moving forward.

Forman says the notion that people won't store and pull financial data in the cloud just isn't valid. It's happening today on recovery.gov. And the fact is, if the government feels secure enough to conduct business transactions in the cloud, where security and privacy are dictated by law, it seems that you can begin to explore this type of approach in the private sector. There is a lot FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) being spread about cloud computing, but we are moving ever closer to a cloud future and you need to be looking at this as an option for your company if you want to stay competitive. - Ron