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Enterprise Content Management has changed drastically during the ten years or so it has existed as a concept. It started life as localised document management and paper-imaging systems but now plays a much wider role within the modern enterprise, including storing and managing a broad variety of different types of content that simply did not exist ten years ago.

THE CHANGING ROLE OF ECM
The sheer volume of content in a modern enterprise can be bewildering and keeping track of every last plan, proposal, video, tweet, email, white paper, article and more can be a thankless task. The role of content, and therefore the role of ECM has also changed dramatically. Content is now a central component of many enterprises' operations, being used and managed so it can directly help meet business objectives.

The main aim of most ECM implementations is to manage, share and process electronic content across the enterprise. That still holds true but we now expect to extend that content beyond the firewall - to remote staff, to a variety of mobile devices and to third parties, whether they are consultants, suppliers, partners or other. Enterprises want to store, manage and analyse large volumes of data and content, wherever it is filed and whatever form it might take, and deliver the most relevant information to whoever requires it, in context and when they need it most.

Against this backdrop of changing roles and types of content, many organisations have accumulated multiple ECM or Document Management (DM) systems as a result of mergers, re-organisations and localised solutions. At the same time, ERP, CRM and line-of-business (LOB) systems have been steadily collecting documents, and these also need to be shared much more widely. ECM is also likely to be the gateway to a records management (RM) archive.

There was once a clear roadmap for ECM to achieve these primary goals, but we are now truly at a crossroads. Which of these systems do we use for collaboration, which for document process workflows, which for emails, and which for long term records management? Do we consolidate and migrate or connect and federate? Do we hook up to mobile devices through the firewall or do we use the cloud? Should we put all of our content in the cloud, or just some of it - or none of it?

AT THE CROSSROADS
We sought to explore these issues in our recent report 'ECM at the Crossroads', which surveyed 538 individual members of the AIIM community, looking at migration and legacy issues, and integration with other enterprise systems. We took the principle of universal access and measured its success across remote, mobile and third-party access.

The findings at first glance make alarming reading for those that work in ECM. On average, organisations manage two or more ECM, DM or Records Management (RM) systems and 26 per cent of those surveyed had more than four systems in place. Four per cent confessed to having more than ten operational systems.

But even with these multiple systems in place, approximately half of all content is held in non-ECM/DM systems, with only 18 per cent of firms saying they had completed an enterprise-wide ECM implementation. This is just two per cent more than the last AIIM ECM survey in 2011.

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