Coincident with its just completed annual conference, AiiM is out with a state of the state of enterprise content management (ECM) survey. There's all kinds of good data to dig into and the document is available at the AiiM website simply by enrolling at no cost (just as it is worthwhile to sign up as a Gold Club member at no cost here at ebizQ to get access to BPM feature articles and BPM Viewpoints).
The two factoids in the AiiM report findings that I keyed on were as follows:
- Email is still out of control, with 55% of organizations having little or no confidence that important emails are recorded, complete and retrievable.
- The single ECM system concept is still alive in 35% of organizations, whereas 33% plan to use a single sign-on portal to link together multiple repositories - SharePoint being the most popular tool for doing so - with 9% stating they will use Enterprise Search to solve this problem.
I covered other AiiM-sponsored research here on ebizQ recently that covered SharePoint exclusively. The fact that it has become such a key part of ECM in such a short time period also makes it a key part of business process management (BPM).
As for the email issue, that is a critical component of many BPM strategies but is like the so-called last mile of copper wire in otherwise fiber-optic communications systems. It's the proverbial weak link. From a BPM point of view, emails are not only not "recorded, complete and retrievable," the real issue is that you probably have very little confidence that they will be acted upon. What kind of business process does that make!
A couple of questions here (maybe even fodder for an upcoming feature article like my recent study of BPM in Accounting):
- If you are a BPM user, what are you doing in your BPM efforts to make sure the human takes action.
- If you supply BPM-enabling software, what have you built into your product to help encourage the human to take action?
Not surprising, given the first bullet above, SMS/text messages, blogs and wikis are "off the corporate radar in 75% of organizations" when it comes to content management.
For most people, you wouldn't think of blogs and wikis as part of a business process set. But for me, on the other hand, a blog is what kicked off my writing this post.
-- Dennis Byron
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