During the 2010 AIIM Expo Opening Session, John Mancini – President of AIIM, laid out “8 Disruptive Forces That Will Transform the Content Management Industry”. Referencing Seth Godin’s quote of “When the platform changes, the leaders change”, set the tone for the changing environment content management is rapidly moving towards. Some of the key takeaways are as follows:

#1 – Demographics is destiny.

• Age demographics play a major role in information and knowledge management.
• Baby boomers are retiring and causing a major brain drain. There is a need to get knowledge out of their heads and into documentation before they leave the workforce.
• Millennials coming into the workforce have different expectations on how information is accessed and consumed. The challenge is to present information to Millennials so they can effectively use it.

#2 – Drowning in a sea of information.

• Chaos of data is driving organizations towards ECM.
• The lines between structured and unstructured data are strained as organizations struggle to manage their content.
• There is a conflict over whether an organization should be required to permanently store any electronic records.

#3 – The social tsunami.

• 65% of fortune 100 companies’ employees use twitter.
• 40-50% of employers bar employee access to twitter, YouTube, AOL AIM, and Facebook.
• Productivity gains can be made by internal social networking.
• IBM has 100,000 employees using internal blogs.

#4 – The 2nd (and 3rd and 4th!) mobile revolution.

• There are currently 4.6 billion Cell phone subscribers.
• A third wave of smart devices will change the way we access and interact with content.
• A fourth wave of devices will embed business process as part of its features. Example: A smartphone with a scanner application.
• The App Store for the enterprise is around the corner.
• iPad methodology and technology could be a game changer as the decision to use a “device” instead of a full-fledged “laptop” becomes more prevalent.

#5 – Clash of the Titans.

• Google v. Microsoft: Google Search v. Bing. Google Apps v. Office 2010 in the cloud.
• Stakes are very large as they are head to head in their profit centers.
• The ripple down effect of this battle will define how organizations and consumers access and manage content.

#6 – The Shutterfly effect.

• Enterprises have experienced consumer IT and want to apply it to their enterprise needs.
• Sites such as Shutterfly impact the expectations for rolling out enterprise ECM.
• 80% found it is easier to locate content on the Web versus internal company structures.

#7 – The Consumerization of ECM.

• SharePoint is taking over ECM. It solved basic problems first, created loyalty, and worked with IT operations to get in the door.
• There is a greater awareness of document management solutions.
• Other ECM platform vendors will both resist and support SharePoint.
• Expect a lot of reactions. Most people believe SharePoint is just an application, while it is really a platform to create applications on.
• The proliferation of the cloud will have profound effects on content management.
• A host of players are getting involved in ECM. This ranges from large enterprise vendors to open source platforms.
• CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Standards) will break down proprietary document repositories. It will be likened to what SQL did for databases.

#8 – The users are restless.

• Vendors who respond to this restlessness are the ones who will have the competitive advantage.
• 91% of businesses are concerned about the cost of ECM ownership.
• At some point the enterprise stopped representing the “business”, and started to represent “bigness”.
• Users are not expecting to invest in legacy systems.
• Users are not expecting to pay for upgrades.
• Users are not expecting any more browser compatibility issues.
• Users are tired of customizations, and believe the focus should be on configuration.
• Users are tired of systems that are difficult to use and difficult to integrate.

After listening to John Mancini’s remarks, it was clear that this is a time of change that could either yield great improvements or cause the fragmentation of an industry already torn by proprietary systemic approaches. In this environment, there will be clear winners and losers. The winners being the vendors and organizations who embrace straightforward and compatible systems, and the losers being those who hold onto legacy mindsets and processes.

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