Enterprise content management (ECM) platforms are becoming increasingly critical knowledge infrastructure as companies aim to empower employees, improve productivity, and respond nimbly in highly competitive markets. New advancements in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and mobility have unleashed the potential for ECM to create tremendous business value.
Let‘s dive into the latest market stats and trends to understand the current and future importance of ECM.
Burgeoning ECM Market Reflects Strategic Priority
The ECM market is expected to grow at a 16% CAGR to reach $11 billion globally by 2020 according to Statista. Organizations are allocating more budget to enterprise-wide ECM implementations as they embrace digital transformation. Key drivers include:
- Need to eliminate information silos and centralize content
- Desire for mobility, collaboration and seamless workflows
- Pressure to demonstrate compliance and security
Industry Breakdown of ECM Adoption
ECM investment and strategic prioritization varies significantly across verticals. According to recent survey data, the financial services and insurance sector leads the pack with over 50% indicating an organization-wide content strategy. Healthcare, life sciences and manufacturing rank next in maturity.
On the other end of the spectrum, areas like construction, transportation and retail have considerable room for improvement – with only ~25% having an integrated ECM approach. While these industries certainly produce content assets and have productivity challenges, regulatory pressures have been less acute.
As disruption accelerates everywhere, no company can afford to leave this problem unaddressed for long.
Market leaders like OpenText, Microsoft, Hyland and Alfresco are expected to benefit as more complex, large-scale deployments gain momentum. Most Fortune 500 companies already utilize ECM in some departments, but still have significant runway standardizing platforms across business units to fully capitalize on benefits.
Overcoming Organizational Resistance and Enabling Change
Given 70% failure rates for large IT projects historically, change management plays a pivotal role in ECM success. Beyond addressing common resource constraints and technical complexities, stakeholders need to align on goals, create buy-in across silos, and provide sufficient training when processes and user habits are disrupted.
Best practices include careful stakeholder mapping, targeted communication plans, creation of superusers groups, and leadership modeling of desired adoption behaviors. Ongoing support and communications are also vital after go-live to reinforce changes, collect user feedback to optimize solutions, and celebrate wins along the way.
The High Costs of Unstructured Information
Employees spend inordinate amounts of time searching for information needed to perform their jobs. Studies reveal the staggering costs of these inefficiencies:
- Knowledge workers spend 19% of their time searching and gathering information (McKinsey)
- $60 – $85 billion lost annually across Fortune 500 companies due to poor information access
- Engineers lose up to 10 hours per month due to document inefficiencies (Xenit)
It‘s clear that poor knowledge management severely impacts productivity, decision making and ultimately top line results. But just how pervasive is this issue across enterprises?
Recent research by M-Files indicates that:
- 44% struggle to find information daily or multiple times per day
- 51% believe key business decisions are delayed due to information access issues
- 49% think their organization likely loses revenue for this reason
As competition heats up in every sector, no organization can afford to leave this problem unaddressed.
Emerging ECM Capabilities to Watch
Rapid innovation focused on leveraging AI, machine learning and predictive analytics will unlock the next level of efficiency and insight gains from ECM systems. Key capabilities on the horizon include:
- Automated document classification and metadata tagging
- Smart search and recommendation engines
- Anomaly detection on unusual content workflows
- Risk analysis based on legal clauses or contracts
- Voice-based interactions with content repositories
IDC predicts at least 50% of large organizations will begin piloting these innovative approaches by 2025 – reimagining future possibilities of how knowledge is captured, connected, understood and shared.
ECM Delivers Transformative Business Impact
Enterprises are now demonstrating how ECM investments yield compelling ROI across critical performance metrics:
ROI Ranges Dramatically Based on Prior System Sophistication
Organizations still relying purely on file shares or basic content management point solutions have the most dramatic performance upside. However even moving from a traditional system to a more robust, cloud-based enterprise platform yields strong benefit.
Further, ECM creates organizational efficiencies translating into:
- 50%+ reductions in processing costs by centralizing workflows (Kyocera Document Solutions)
- 65% boost in accounts receivable collections by increasing staff productivity (Maana)
- 84% faster invoice processing by eliminating manual tasks (Greenbank RSL)
Beyond direct financial upside, companies report benefits such as improved compliance, customer experience and time to market for new products by establishing consistency, security and collaboration across content systems.
The Competitive Imperative for Integrated ECM
In analyzing leading global enterprises across sectors, a key differentiator emerges – the presence of an integrated ECM strategy tied directly to strategic priorities.
High performance organizations are 67% more likely to have an articulated content strategy encompassing modern platforms, governance and cross-functional coordination.
They approach ECM as pivotal infrastructure enabling key digital transformation goals:
- Omnichannel customer engagement
- Seamless global team collaboration
- Accelerated innovation cycles
- Higher efficiency touchless processing
- Proactive risk management
Laggards operating in silos not only incur tremendous bottom line waste, but inhibit their ability to compete at the pace demanded today.
Correlating ECM Maturity with Business Outcomes
A recent McKinsey analysis of 100 companies highlights a high correlation between ECM sophistication and self-reported achievement of financial targets over a 3-year period.
Organizations ranking in the top quartile of ECM maturity were 2.2x more likely to significantly exceed revenue goals. They also surpassed peers on innovation measures like new product introduction and customer satisfaction scores.
This data reveals ECM‘s progressing from a cost play to a vital driver of growth outcomes going forward.
Best Practices for Maximizing ECM Success
Leading global enterprises point to several key best practices for unlocking the full potential of ECM across the organization:
Secure Executive Alignment and Resources
Like any large-scale organizational change effort, ECM success hinges on clear direction setting and sustained commitment from senior leadership. C-level sponsorship is vital to accurately size investments required, enable adoption across functions, and provide air cover during the inevitable speed bumps.
Failure to properly fund and staff ECM initiatives dramatically increases risk. One large insurance company attempted an ambitious re-platforming to modernize key policy and claims systems. However, leadership refused requests to augment technical teams already at capacity – causing major schedule overruns and user frustration that derailed adoption.
Take an Enterprise-First Approach
While targeted solutions can yield short term wins, the game changing impact surfaces when content workflows are considered holistically across the customer journey – from product design teams, through sales and service interactions, over to finance and risk oversight.
This eliminates friction points and information gaps that plague employees and customers at each transition. It does necessitate revamping some entrenched and deeply ingrained habits around information hoarding and rigid functional silos however.
Develop an ECM Center of Excellence
As repositories scale and usage expands, relying on a few technologists or records managers alone to govern system enhancements and policy modifications will constrain innovation.
Forward-thinking companies instead develop a multi-disciplinary ECM excellence team encompassing business SMEs along with process improvement and Analytics talent.
This group meets regularly to discuss adoption patterns, ideate on high-ROI opportunities to optimize content workflows through new integrations or tooling, and spot emerging information risks.
Essentially they function as internal ECM consultants helping the broader organization extract maximum leverage. They provide an invaluable feedback loop to IT and executive sponsors while accelerating grassroots-led innovation.
The Future of AI-Powered Knowledge Management
Looking ahead, artificial intelligence and machine learning will expand the possibilities of ECM dramatically. Key capabilities like cognitive search, automated metadata tagging, personalized recommendations and predictive analytics will enable greater efficiencies and insights over time.
As global competition intensifies, an organization‘s collective knowledge is becoming its most strategic asset. Leading enterprises recognize ECM‘s pivotal role in harnessing this advantage to thrive in the future. Those still playing catch up risk being left behind.