AIIM Knowledge Center Blog

AIIM to present new research findings at TAWPI 2009 Capture Conference

AIIM Vice President, Atle Skjekkeland, ECMs, will present findings from the new AIIM State of the Capture Industry Watch research study in a plenum presentation at the TAWPI Capture Conference to be held at the Hyatt Regency Pier 66 in Ft. Lauderdale, FL on December 9, 2009. The AIIM Capture Industry Watch research amongst AIIM’s 65,000 strong community identifies the real benefits of scanning and process automation, where to implement them, and how to ensure a quick ROI.

Titled “Capture: the real benefits of scanning and process automation?” This session looks at how in a tough economy it is necessary to cut costs for most organizations, but some companies have realized a quick ROI of implementing scanning and process automation and how removing paper from information intensive processes improves efficiency and control, which often leads to significant hard dollar savings.

Pre-conference: AIIM ECM Practitioner Course

In addition to the plenum session, AIIM and TAWPI have also organized a 1 day intensive ECM Practitioner Course set for Monday December 7, 2009. AIIM’s ECM Practitioner Course is being offered as a pre-Conference workshop covering ECM technologies, their business benefits, and how to plan ECM using information architecture, metadata and taxonomies.

Separately, the capture conference fee is $629 and the ECM Practitioner workshop is $599 but as an AIIM Member, if you act now and would like to bundle them together, we have a special offer for you. When you bundle the conference together with the workshop, you will receive a $500 package discount! All you have to do is click here to register and enter the discount code “ECM1-AIIM” when you check out.

What say you? Are you planning to attend the TAWPI 2009 Capture Conference? What do you hope to learn from your attendance? I want to hear from you and learn what you and your organization are doing.

Bob Larrivee – AIIM

blarrivee@aiim.org

Follow me on twitter – BobLarrivee and remember to visit www.aiim.org/training and www.informationzen.org, AIIM’s free social network created just for you.

 

Do you manage electronic records as well as you do paper?

In a recent AIIM Industry Watch Report based on Electronic Records Management (ERM) titled Electronic Records Management - still playing catch-up with paper, we found that electronic records are still taken less seriously than physical records. We also found that it appears organizations are placing the responsibility for applying good records management practices to electronic records is being placed on IT rather than the records manager. Several other key findings from this report include:

· Electronic records are more than twice as likely to be described as “Unmanaged” than paper records

· 71% of organizations have a procedure for legal hold of paper records in the event of litigation, but only 57% have one for electronic records

· For 25% of organizations, legal discovery of paper records would take at least a month, whereas for electronic records this is 17%

· There is a reliance on IT staff to carry out legal discovery on electronic records in the majority of companies, whereas records management staff or line-of-business staff deals with paper records.

The report continues to cite that:

· Of those organizations with no ECM/ERM system, 60% would not be confident, if challenged, that their electronic records have not been changed, deleted or inappropriately accessed

· 38% of those polled admit that there is little or no enforcement of their records management policies and 55% set no guidance on dealing with important emails as records

· 31% of organizations have 20 or more content repositories that could usefully be linked, with email as the highest priority content

· Over 70% of organizations have made no plans or provision for long-term archiving of electronic records, with no policies for migrating to new media, translating formats, or virtualization of applications

 

In my view, this is somewhat disturbing as the only thing different between a physical record and an electronic record is the format in which it is contained. The idea that IT should be responsible for applying good records management practices to electronic records is placing the organization at risk that the right information is not being kept and there would be a lack of compliance with records retention policies. The good news is an encouraging number of organizations are homogenising their electronic and physical policies and practices, and many are moving to an all-electronic model, linking their repositories together in order to improve the legal discovery process and enhance operational efficiency.

 

Organization need to recognize that records management practices should embrace and include electronic records as part of the overall records management program. Just like the physical, records retention, security and disposition policies apply and there is no reason or excuse in today’s business world that this should be different. In my view of an ideal world, Records management is responsible to set policy and manage the activities for all records with IT in place establish and maintain the technology infrastructure that supports those policies and activities. While I do not feel the exclusion of electronic records as part of an overall records management program is intentional, I do feel that the underlying problem is one of being overwhelmed and not knowing how to begin. The first step in all of this it the make the first step be a realization that records are records regardless of format and they need to be addressed as part of the “total” records management program.

 

What say you? How are you managing your electronic records? Do you have a story to tell? I want to hear from you and learn what you and your organization are doing.

 

Looking to increase your level of knowledge? Join us for the ECM Certificate course in:

• Toronto 10/27/09 - 10/30/09
• San Francisco 11/10/09 - 11/13/09
• Houston 11/17/09 - 11/20/09
• San Diego 12/01/09 - 12/04/09
• Philadelphia 12/08/09 – 12/11/09

 

Join us for the ERM Certificate course in:

 

• San Diego 11/10/09 - 11/13/09
• Silver Spring 12/01/09 - 12/04/09
• Tampa  12/15/09 – 12/18/09

We look forward to seeing you there.

 

Are you going to DocuBusiness ‘09 in Milan Italy? If so, be sure to attend a great session by Doug Miles, Research Director for AIIM. Doug is also conducting a new survey on BPM and you can participate by simply going to www.aiimhost.com/survey and answer the series of questions presented.

 

Bob Larrivee – AIIM

blarrivee@aiim.org

Follow me on twitter – BobLarrivee and remember to visit www.aiim.org/training and www.informationzen.org, AIIM’s free social network created just for you.

Nearly 75% of organizations will invest in document management in 2008?

Forrester just asked 1,017 software decision-makers from North American and European enterprise companies about their ECM plans, and the results are overwhelming;

• Nearly 75% of orgs will invest in document management in 2008
• Nearly 65% of orgs will invest in team collaboration software in 2008
• Microsoft leads all vendors by a large margin with nearly 25% of organizations planning to invest in its technology for ECM
• Rather than disrupting the existing ECM vendor landscape, which remains healthy, Microsoft is establishing foundation content services as a new class of ECM functionality

Press here to access a presentation summarizing their findings. Do you trust these numbers? Let me know...

By Atle Skjekkeland.

New Forrester Wave for Message Archiving Software, Q1 2008

Forrester released a few days ago their latest Forrester Wave for message archiving software, and they report that organizations are implementing these solutions to reduce their storage costs, improved mailbox management with easy access to messages, and lower cost of eDiscovery. You have a lot of choices for choosing your message archiving software; pure plays like ZANTAZ, Mimosa Systems and ZipLip; ECM suite providers like EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet and OpenText; storage management and search vendors such as CA, EMC, HP and IBM. Vendors like Symantec also provide message archiving solutions in combination with other products, and vendors like Autonomy ZANTAZ offer message archiving solutions integrated with their enterprise search and text analytics offering. The report is available for free courtesy of ZANTAZ.

And remember to check out AIIM’s new Email Management training program before implementing any of these solutions. The training program is designed from global best practices among AIIM's 50,000 members, and it covers best practices and technologies for:

• Email capture and retention
• Technologies for email management
• Email storage, archiving and backup
• Email classification
• Developing, implementing, and managing the email policy
• Governance

By Atle Skjekkeland.

New Gartner Magic Quadrant for BPMS

I just found out from the Column 2 blog by Sandy Kemsley that Gartner published earlier this month their latest Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites (BPMS). A BPMS must according to Gartner support all the following process management capabilities:

• Modeling and analysis of business process to identify the best possible design
• "Round trip" behavior between the model and its physical implementation
• Coordination of multiple interaction patterns among users participating in the process
• Providing participants with access to various forms of business content for manipulation and management within the process
• User manipulation and management of business rules
• User and group collaboration in the process context
• Monitoring, reporting, analysis and notification of work activities and business events
• Process simulation and optimization using real-time, historical and estimated data values
• Management of all process components through their life cycles

You can access the report for free courtesy of Pegasystems. And I strongly recommend any project team tasked with improving business processes to first sign-up for AIIM's BPM Certificate Program that covers the above issues.

By Atle Skjekkeland.

New Forrester Wave for ECM Q4, 2007

Forrester released last month their latest evaluation of ECM suites, and they claim that industry professionals that drive ECM evaluations want five key items from their ECM suites:

• A single vendor that provides ECM tool breadth.
• An ECM platform they can build an IT skill set around.
• A low-cost way to make content management available to everyone.
• One place to go to mitigate content-related risks.
• A way to put content into context for people.

And how are the ECM vendors supporting this? Below is an extract from the report:

Forrester evaluated 11 vendors across approximately 60 criteria and found that IBM, EMC, and Oracle lead thanks to suite breadth and a focus on enterprise information management needs. Open Text leads all pure plays with a strong core suite of ECM tools. Interwoven, Hyland, and Vignette, all Strong Performers, focus more attention on supporting content-centric applications than providing an ECM platform. Microsoft, another Strong Performer, misses some important features, but it has a bright future in ECM. Finally, Contenders SAP, Xerox, and Alfresco Software lack breadth and depth but show promise in ECM as alternatives to ECM’s four horsemen: EMC, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle.

You can access the report for free courtesy of Oracle.

By Atle Skjekkeland.

Two new Forrester Wave reports available for BPM

Forrester has the last months released two new Forrester Wave reports evaluating BPM products focused on document intensive and human centric processes.

• Forrester Wave™: Business Process Management. For Document Processes, Q3 2007
• The Forrester Wave™: Human-Centric BPM For Java Platforms, Q3 2007

By Atle Skjekkeland.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Email Active Archiving 2007

Gartner released earlier this year a Magic Quadrant for Email Active Archiving. Vendors included in this report must provide products that support the following;

• Provide a searchable archive of all e-mail messages for a defined period of time
• Be used independently or as part of a corporate records repository for legal and business uses
• Be used as a solution to reduce the size of production email data stores to gain operational efficiencies (reduce backup time, improve recovery and eliminate the need for quotas while still keeping the active data store lean).

You may access this report courtesy of Symantec.

By Atle Skjekkeland.

New Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM, 2007

Gartner published last week their new Magic Quadrant for ECM, and you can access this report for free courtesy of OpenText. Gartner sees ECM as an "umbrella"-term that encompasses the following core components:

• Document Management
• Document Imaging
• Electronic Records Management
• Workflow
• Web Content Management
• Document-Centric Collaboration

According to Gartner, the ECM market is worth approximately $2.9 billion in 2007 in worldwide software revenue, and they expect a compound annual growth rate of 12.9% through 2011. This is a healthy market, but it is also one that is undergoing transformation. Content technologies are steadily gaining more capabilities to handle some aspects of structured data as well as unstructured data, and Gartner's vision for the evolutionary path of these technologies is called enterprise information management (EIM).

By Atle Skjekkeland.

New Gartner Magic Quadrant for Information Access

I just received the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Information Access 2007 courtesy of Fast, and you can download a copy of the report from their website. The quadrant includes several new players, but also a lot of changes.

Search is not just search anymore, and Gartner has in recent years been using the term “Information access technology” to include and expand on what they previously called "enterprise search technology”. They use the term information access to include a collection of technologies to help you organize and find information, such as;

• enterprise search;
• content classification, categorization and clustering;
• fact and entity extraction;
• taxonomy creation and management;
• information presentation (for example visualization).

AIIM prefer to use the term "Information Organization & Access" (IOA) instead of just Information Access since many of the above technologies help you organize information for better access. You can learn more about this in our new IOA training program.

By Atle Skjekkeland.