Interview

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 20 No 04 - July/August

DM Editor Dave Tyler caught up with AIIM President John Mancini as he visited the UK for the recent AIIM Roadshow events

David Tyler: Several of the presentations and round table sessions at the AIIM Roadshow are focused on SharePoint and its impact on ECM and on business. Are attendees coming for education about these technologies, or are they users looking for specific help with real world issues?

John Mancini: It seems like we've spent probably the best part of a decade talking about 'the what and the why' of content management - and that is why AIIM has had so much emphasis on certification and training for a long while - but now the 'how' questions are becoming much more dominant. In the four cities that I have visited with the AIIM Roadshow that is what has been driving attendees' questions: things like "I have a SharePoint environment now, how am I best going to use it in my business?" It's not a matter of casual interest these days.

Almost very organisation has some kind of SharePoint presence: some have chosen to put it at the centre of what they're doing with content management, some prefer to have it complement what they're doing - there are a lot of different 'flavours' out there! I know there are people who would say that SharePoint has become the de facto content management solution - I don't think I would go that far; it's one of a number of solutions. But it is in almost every business, so everyone has their own issues with regard to it. There's no question though that SharePoint has changed the landscape, changed what the ECM space is all about: having a company like Microsoft talking about content management, in many ways helps everybody in the industry.

DT: Do you agree with the viewpoint that SharePoint - and the Microsoft marketing machine behind it - have actually helped the ECM industry to be taken seriously?

JM: I think that's exactly true, and that's reflected again in the discussions we're having during the Roadshows. I think it comes down to the fact that people are recognising that SharePoint is a platform rather than an application, and that if you want to do things with it, then you are going to need complementary products in order to make it happen.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe made a point in his keynote presentation that for every dollar being spent on SharePoint, another seven dollars is being spent on complementary services. So yes, I think there has been a growing realisation that this is not going to be a universal panacea that can solve every process problem an organisation ever had. And that is a good thing, I think: it leads people to be more realistic in their assumptions and their expectations.

DT: How does the US market for ECM differ from the UK, and indeed the rest of the world? Is there a 'technology gap'?

JM: It's really not that noticeable: in the USA I'd say we see a little more eagerness to 'test the boundaries' of ECM technologies, in areas such as mobile, social, and the cloud, but I think that gap is closing. After all, all users face the same issues: information assets growing at exponential rates, the variety of those assets is increasing, the risk associated with storage and sharing of those assets is also increasing. What are we going to do about it? That is a fairly common, maybe universal view of the situation right now, wherever you are in the world.

DT: And what about the difference between the large corporates - who are very much the traditional heartland customer base for the big ECM vendors - and the SME marketplace?

JM: The kind of problems I've mentioned used to be very much the sole province of very large companies, or of very large departments within companies. In some of the biggest of those companies, they're starting to realise that storage costs are going to eat them alive! They very often don't have a coherent strategy in place for the ultimate question of what to get rid of. There are lots of different figures available for exactly what percentage of any company's data on its servers is effectively rubbish - the problem is that no-one can figure out exactly what and where that 'rubbish data' is. But there's no denying the percentage is much higher than it ought to be.

So, that's a problem that is already reaching critical mass in large corporates, but we're seeing evidence of it in mid-size companies now too. As these firms become more 'public', using social technologies to try and engage customers, then all their back-end processes that had always been hidden are becoming exposed. It's becoming clear that those processes are often 'clogged up' with paper, and that is driving a kind of renaissance of traditional ECM activity, and lots of renewed interest in capture and BPM.

DT: Would you say that the increased uptake of ECM solutions is driven by a better understanding of the need for process automation?

JM: It's part of the increasing recognition of the importance of scan-to-process as opposed to scan-to-archive. There's a real opportunity there for vendors to move upstream and talk to new potential users. Businesses understand that ECM isn't just about putting data into an electronic file cabinet - that is what we were doing, for a long time, and it was at least better than having all that paper hanging around - but now it's about how to use this technology to launch a business process.

It's a fascinating change for the industry. Users are finally starting to think about capture in the context of the process. When you start thinking from a process-centric perspective, then you start to realise that it doesn't make sense to keep printing out information assets, or even re-scanning prints of those assets! When we talk to people for our surveys about satisfaction and return from technologies, they definitely get more satisfied the further they move along that route from archive to process enablement. That has to be good news for us and for the industry.

Ultimately, organisations are not buying a capture or ECM technology these days: they are buying responsiveness, they're buying efficiency. And again as customer facing systems and social technologies develop, they're generating a 'pull' for ECM technologies to support them.

More info: www.aiim.org.uk

Interview