Doculabs

 
A couple months ago Linda Andrews wrote two posts on some of the ECM and Social Media trends we at Doculabs have been discussing recently. She talks about General Market Trends and Deployment Trends .

I like them as trends because they have the earmarks of actual trends that matter – significant changes in behavior and technology relevant to the organizations that use ECM (and relevant also, but secondarily, to ECM suppliers). By “earmarks,” I primarily mean the following. Important trends usually have the following characteristics:

1. The important trends are both “pulled” by the demand side (customers) and “pushed” by the supply side (vendors). Many purported trends are driven by vendor push that isn’t matched by a corresponding demand pull. This has historically been the case – first with workflow, which was given a second push as BPM, and which now is getting a third push as case management. Compare this to the important trends toward use of SharePoint, mobile platforms, and social media, all three of which are clearly propelled by both push and pull.
2. The important trends are driven by forces outside of ECM. This is clearly the case with the cloud, SaaS, mobile, and social media. Virtually all the forces that drove the evolution and wider adoption of electronic records management came from outside the world of RM professionals and suppliers. Most records would still be in boxes in the basement if it weren’t for the increased regulatory and litigation requirements that started hitting after 2001.
3. The important trends are proven in production (or at least have pieces that have been proven in production to indicate that they are viable). This last criterion is often neglected, and many of the disappointments in ECM in the last 10 years have been the result of seductive ideas that have failed to work in practice.

Here are five examples of dangerous ECM trends, ECM practices, or technologies that in the last few years have failed to work well in practice. Many of them can be used effectively if you are careful. Most of you probably have stories to tell about your encounters with one or more of the following:

What I’ve learned from my own experience with these five dangerous trends is not that they should never be put into practice, but rather that their useful applicability is far narrower than conventional wisdom (encouraged by vendor marketing) had assumed. This is the case with each one of them – with SharePoint/ECM integration, federated records management, auto-classification, single-vendor ECM and e-discovery, and enterprise search. Sometimes they are the only tool that will do the job. But in most cases they have done more harm than good.

*See previous post, “Keep Your SharePoint Integrations Simple,” for the details.