I’ve recently written a series of posts on the future of ECM, identifying 13 trends that I’ve observed:
- Making the “E” in Enterprise Content Management actually mean something … looks at how the ‘E’ in ECM is starting to truly mean something with the trend around unifying content between ECM and enterprise business applications.
- The seduction of the species … looks at how the next generation of user interfaces will seduce users in the workplace to maximise their participation in information sharing and re-use.
- The spawning of a new construction boom … looks at the huge impact that I think CMIS will have on the ECM industry.
- Evolutionary Road … examines the evolution of the web from 1.0 – 4.0.
- Customer engagement … looks at Social CRM and Sentiment Analysis as technology areas that overlap with ECM.
- The Collaborative Office … considers the benefits and issues of social collaboration tools.
- Semantonomics … the art of deriving value from information.
- Market consolidation … looks at the mergers and acquisitions in the ECM market over past 10 years and considers what lies ahead.
- ECM as a commodity … considers the impact of core ECM functionality becoming commoditised.
- Impact of Open Source … explores the impact that open source ECM vendors are having in the market.
- Wider adoption of Information Rights Management … looks at the increasing role that Information Rights Management will play as a trend around ECM implementations over the coming years.
- Component Content Management … examines the case for modular authoring, assembling and publishing of content.
- ECM in the Cloud … discusses how ECM is increasingly becoming a natural candidate for deployment into the cloud.
I’ve deliberately avoided trying to make predictions in these posts, instead focusing on what I see as some of the key emerging trends. I fully appreciate that my view of the trends will be far from an exhaustive list, so I would love to hear other people’s views on where the ECM industry is going.
These trends have now been brought together and published by Logica in a paper called ‘Future of ECM – the next five years’.
The Digital Word on the Street 