Key Trends in ECM SharePoint Market 2009

Key Trends in the ECM Market

Among the primary trends that IT architects and planners and business leaders must consider as they develop content management strategies and determine their strategic partners are the following.

ECM is now part of IT infrastructure and delivered by infrastructure vendors such as HP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and SAP. Inquiries received by Gartner suggest that enterprise architects and IT planners are increasingly looking to standardize on one or more of these vendors' strategic platform offerings to support multiple content applications.

Integration and federation of content repositories is now critical. Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS), the Web services protocol jointly developed and proposed by EMC, IBM, Microsoft and others, may succeed where others have failed. It is designed to provide a vendor-neutral way of developing applications that can access content stored in any CMIS-compliant repository.

Web channel technologies that deliver improved experiences, customer conversions and loyalty are a primary focus of many enterprises. The influence of the chief marketing officer in directing spending on marketing machines that capitalize on Web content management (WCM), digital asset management (DAM), Web analytics, portals, e-forms, document composition features, social communities, mobile device support and business process management (BPM) is now obvious. The ability to deliver more compelling, dynamic, personalized and media-rich content to any audience on any device, and to measure more accurately the value of the interrelationships of people, processes and content, has led to a breakaway from the ECM suite: "WCM for marketing."

Application specificity, based on evolving buying centers. Fewer ECM vendors will focus on bundling generalist functions (such as imaging, library services and document collaboration), leaving these functions to infrastructure vendors. Most vendors will instead focus on adding value by bundling specific functions as "base configurations" — vertical or horizontal solutions that are integrated with industry, ERP or CRM applications. Composite content applications are how ECM vendors will deliver value to business buyers. Broadly, such solutions fall into three categories, according to the technologies most often involved in their development. Very few vendors have a market-leading emphasis on, and ability in, all three categories. The three categories are as follows:

• Transactional content management solutions focus on imaging, workflow/BPM, archive, records management and e-forms. Content contained within these solutions tends to be static. Processes tend to be long-running and have a high number of forms or documents that demand scalability, life cycle control and human approval (primarily on exceptions). An application interface is almost certain.
• Collaborative content management solutions focus on compound content object control and library services; document collaboration; workflow automation with alerts, calendaring and task-tracking; browser or portal viewing; and markup, annotation and version control. The focus is on high-value people being involved in the project-based or long-running development and delivery of high-value content and on optimizing the processes, interfaces and objectives that relate them.
• Contextual content management solutions focus on sets of Web channel technology, such as WCM, DAM, portals, e-forms, Web analytics, social software, XML authoring, rich media management and mobile device support, and on optimizing them to serve as Web-delivered engagement platforms for a variety of industry-focused solutions.

Alternative delivery models. More companies and governments want new methods of obtaining ECM capability, including SaaS and open-source software. These new methods will grow in comparison to conventional delivery, but will not eclipse it. Emerging "solutions as a service" or hosted composite content applications represent the best conversion leverage from on-premises to cloud-based content for business buyers looking to keep costs low and take advantage of optimal combinations of technology, location and process logic. Many suite vendors will deliver SaaS as a satellite offering.

The influence of metadata is becoming clearer, whether abstracted from existing paper and digital documents or added when authored, and whether tied to a formal taxonomy or tagged informally by users. As more content objects, ranging from small XML components to larger rich-media files, need to be managed better, the concept of granularity — in the content itself, in the policies and rules associated with content "processability," and in user information (wants/needs, presence, location) — is a key planning consideration for enterprises seeking fuller leverage of information as assets. The more descriptors a content object has, the more likely it is to deliver more value in various contexts.

Enhanced usability for nontechnical target audiences. It is now normal for user interfaces for content contribution, consumption and collaboration to be competitive differentiators. More capabilities are becoming easier to access and use, and they include a vast array of modular functions that can be turned on or off as required. Although an ideal "content client" has yet to emerge, usability and the end-user acceptance are becoming key criteria for selection.

The continued influence of the midmarket as a buying center — particularly for composite content applications in healthcare, government, financial services, higher education and invoice automation — is bringing higher revenue to even some of the larger ECM vendors. Those that focus here have seen significant growth year over year. Here is also an early opportunity for SaaS and open-source vendors to gain traction and visibility.

Hybrid Content Architectures Emerge

Gartner's analysis shows that organizations of all sizes and in all geographies are considering Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) because of the breadth of capabilities it offers, and because Microsoft is already one of their strategic infrastructure providers. As SharePoint takes hold in an organization, users naturally begin exploring its suitability for a wider range of content management applications and its potential as a replacement for existing solutions. But organizations requiring advanced content management capabilities and process-centric applications will need to augment SharePoint's capabilities with partner offerings or deploy MOSS 2007 alongside an ECM system, rather than as a replacement for it.

For organizations where broader information consistency and consistent semantic representations are critical, strategy will become somewhat more complicated. Issues like federated search, metadata strategies, and interoperability between content and records management systems will be critical considerations in SharePoint deployments. Although ECM vendors are touting their ability to integrate with SharePoint, it often isn't integration as much as copying files over. When evaluating integration, always attempt to have "one version of the truth." Having one document in SharePoint and a supposed duplicate in an ECM system invites data integrity issues — if the documents actually aren't the same, which is the right one? Many enterprises have failed at content management and might be better advised to determine what percentage of content not to manage and to use a resource for that purpose. A "draft layer" of content at the infrastructure level, with life cycle assignment only upon content creation and a promotion path to the repository of record, makes for a likely preliminary hybrid content architecture plan.