The state of ECM…and knowledge management?

I had a strategic counsel call last week with a large vendor thinking about expanding its product portfolio in the direction of ECM. We discussed whether this investment should be in the area of records management and archiving or full-boat document management with BPM.

Well, according to AIIM’s recent “State of the ECM Industry” survey, 2008 spending plans are focused on the records, documents, and processes, so it seems either bet could be a smart one. John Mancini elaborates:

At the top of the list of spending plans for the next 12-18 months are workflow/BPM (45% planning a spending increase), document management (45%), and records management (43%).

The whole AIIM survey is available and is interesting reading if you follow ECM.

Another thing I noted in these survey results is that only 5% of respondents plan to spend “much more” than last year on “Enterprise 2.0.” This is the same amount that plans to spend “much more” on knowledge management. And 24% of respondents plan to spend “slightly more” this year on “knowledge management,” compared to only 20% on “Enterprise 2.0.”

I wonder what they put in the knowledge management bucket that’s separate from “Enterprise 2.0?” I would certainly argue that social networking and related technologies are the latest-and-greatest type of knowledge management, especially when you’re talking about internal deployments. We even went so far as to delete ‘knowledge management’ from our taxonomy...

Tags: , , , ,

2 comments ↓

#1 Dan Keldsen on 03.13.09 at 1:28 pm

Nick – curious if, a year later, you still believe knowledge management should’ve been deleted from the 451 taxonomy. The term has waxed and waned over the years, but seems to be catching fire again in recent months.

Have been covering and doing knowledge management work for years now – so for ME, it never went away – but as a buzzword, definitely died down, only to (perhaps) be either re-born as Enterprise 2.0, or back again as KM or KM 2.0.

Best,
Dan

#2 Kathleen Reidy on 03.16.09 at 9:20 am

Hi Dan,

I don’t think we’ve felt the need to have Knowledge Management as a node in our taxonomy, but we do have a what is probably an overpopulated category for Social Software. It’s much the same thing to me and I agree the practices themselves haven’t gone away, we just started using different lingo to talk about them. As far as our research taxonomy goes, we’re mostly trying to help readers access our content, and don’t see many people searching on “knowledge management.” 😉