AIIM has been producing a state of the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) industry report for a number of years. The 2010 version was recently released. This annual report is based on over 700 responses from users across all industry sectors and sizes, and at all stages of ECM planning and adoption. There are great deal of useful findings related to ECM and I recommend looking at the complete report that can be downloaded form their site.
In this post I will mostly look at their social media findings. They found regarding social media and Enterprise 2.0, 29% of respondents view internal E2.0 as “imperative” or “significant” to their organization’s business goals, citing knowledge sharing, team collaboration and project coordination as the main drivers. I was hoping for broader penetration but their audience seems to be at all stages of ECM use so these numbers may go beyond any biases that come just looking at early adopters or vendors’ cherry picking of active users to see how the market as a whole is looking at enterprise 2.0.
They also found that 21% of respondents regard use of external social media as “imperative” or “significant” particularly as a marketing tool for publicity, and for customer feedback. I might have thought that external use would get higher results than internal but I am actually pleased to see the relative higher rating for internal use. That was what first got me interested in the possibilities of social media for business.
They found that staff access to Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and Instant Messaging is barred in 45% of organizations. This actually makes the numbers above look good. Their audience certainly includes a lot of overly protective firms so the overall results are certainly not biased with too many early adopters.
In addition, instant messages, Twitter posts and blog posts are not archived in 80% of the organizations using them. This represents a real lost opportunity, as there is a lot of great data about the conversations within an enterprise waiting for discovery in these social media.
The study found that 59% agree that social networking will make a dramatic change to business life in the next few years. This is interesting given the much lower rates of adoption in the audience. However, 56% are inclined to see Twitter as a timewaster rather than “an important rapid-feedback tool”. I guess many are part of the 45% companies than ban Twitter.
Finally, the report states 60% find it easier to locate “knowledge” on the Web than on internal systems. I used to ask this question when I spoke on social media and knowledge management and I never found a single audience member who said it was easier to find content within their organization than on the Web. I guess my audiences were biased. The same number, 60% of new ECM users, listed “content chaos” as the trigger for adopting ECM so there is alignment of these results. It is an interesting report and worth looking at.
Content chaos is something that the Darwin Awareness Engine™ is designed to address. It can look into the content within most ECM systems to provide an understanding of the emerging trends that are occurring within the system.
Finally, the report states 60% find it easier to locate “knowledge” on the Web than on internal systems. I used to ask this question when I spoke on social media and knowledge management and I never found a single audience member who said it was easier to find content within their organization than on the Web.
Posted by: Microsoft Office 2007 | October 27, 2010 at 09:13 PM