Ecm initiatives

2008: The Year of Microsoft SharePoint-centric ECM Solutions2007 has been another interesting year in the history books for Enterprise Content Management (ECM).In spite of uncertainty around our national economy and the general business outlook, organizations continued to purchase ECM solutions as they strive to improve the control and manageability of their critical information assets (content), enhance the operational processing environment, and strengthen their internal corporate governance or regulated compliance initiatives.

The working group on "Interoperable ECM" (iECM) sponsored by industry association AIIM held another formative meeting today. It's tough getting standards groups off the ground, but the group saw good progress, not the least of which was to decide to eschew developing new standards before existing ones could be mapped concretely against canonical content management processes to see what exactly is missing. For a while, the discussion drifted a bit too deeply into the the semantic-web weeds, but I think practical goals will prevail, so if you are interested in interoperable content management systems -- as either a user or a supplier -- then I encourage you to participate in this effort.

Government is the biggest IT market in the world and, arguably, the most stable. Over the past decade, ECM VARs won their share of business in this space as a result of the e-government initiatives many federal, state, and local government agencies put in place to make their content and services accessible via the Web. With the Internet now firmly entrenched as a communication medium, the time has come for VARs to examine how far along different levels of the government are with these initiatives and how lucrative the market for e-government solutions is today. Used with permission from Business Solutions magazine

Hastings Mutual Insurance Company's integration of ECM into the insuranceunderwriting, accounting, and claims processes helped the company to realize a reduction in the time necessary to process new policy applications, improved service to agents and customers, a virtual elimination of lost files, multiple user access to documents concurrently through parallel processes, and increased support of the company's regulatory initiatives. Submitted by Hyland Software

Traditionally, government agencies weren't associated with the latest and/or most practical IT-enabling technologies. This negative perception has started to change over the past couple of years, however, and e-government initiatives are playing a key role. E-government is as much a way of doing business and way of communicating with the public as it is a technology. E-government comprises a group of enabling technologies, including ECM, Web publishing, document management, GIS, and Web services. Used with permission from Integrated Solutions magazine

IBM has announced the release of open-source infrastructure for combining text analytic tools called Unstructured Information Management Architecture, or "UIMA." As usual, Jon Udell has one of the better first takes. I'm going to write more about UIMA elsewhere, but right now I'll just argue that it will help put the discipline of text mining on the map. It also makes me think that we could use a similar framework for the ECM space: a core, open-source architecture for plugging in disparate vendor solutions to normalize task and content flow within specific applications. To start such an initiative, it would take a prominent company with a large professional services cadre....say, IBM?