it made for some good reading but I think the numbers need to go down one more level to be really useful. For instance, the survey claims 40% of respondents have completed or are implementing an enterprise-scale or company-wide programme but what it doesn't say is what size and types of organizations are doing so (though they do have that information). It might be tempting to apply the percentages to companies as a whole but I can imagine that there is a strong correlation between organizational size and Enterprise-scale ECM adoption.

Similarly, nearly 30% of respondents are in government and the public sector and while that might be representational of the ECM market (I don't know) I have to believe that the business drivers and focus are, in general, different from those of large, public, for-profit corporations. I think the utility of this survey is lessened by lumping all respondents together.

A couple other things pop out as well

... 82% of the respondents were non-managerial staff or consultants, I think those folk can speak to yesterday and today within their organizations and job functions but less so about the future (except the very near future) and outside their roles. I also wonder how accurate questions like Figure 23 and 24 (on corporate spending) can really be for staff members.

... 77% responses are North American, that seems a heavy skew to me though I'm not sure how it might affect the overall survey

In all while I think all of the numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt, the finding that email remains essentially unmanaged across the board remains the most significant and telling. I'll venture to guess that the reason for this is cost. Until and unless you are faced with a significant e-discovery request and feel the pinch of that effort or been smacked by a judge for not being able to meet such a request, it is difficult to justify the cost of managing email. I liken it to the cost of water / sewage in most North American communities ... what we pay doesn't really reflect the true cost of the resource and when we see the true cost all too often the cheaper (wrong) choice is made ... you dump raw sewage into waterways and you keep all email for a long period of time. Email management solutions tend to highlight just how expensive email is in reality, not the bytes hidden on workstations but the words hidden from view.

Managing emails would, in my opinion, easily double and likely treble most enterprise email expenses (perhaps more) with little hope for any return ... if your company is running a legitimate business using sound business practices, your e-discovery requests will be few and probably well contained to a few people then going to the trouble of managing (using RM) each message will prove much more expensive then just keeping copies. Until, that is, a certain organizational size is reached and the work becomes justified.

Anyway, my point is really that this AIIM survey's results are simply not believable as being applicable to business in general. I heard a colleague quoting some of these "results" as they were trying to point out why we all need ECM, but it just didn't sound real. It sounded like what I perceive it to be, a self-serving survey that had no wider applicability. I felt sorry for him as he was using these results to try to push his particular ECM solution, it sounded hollow and I think the sales seen in that particular space have proved that he, at least, has misinterpreted the survey results. believing there to be a market I'm still not yet certain will ever exist.

Finally, ECM is about content and yet the technology is much more about specific content not content in general. If there is a content risk in the world right now it is IM, Facebook and Twitter, none of which is being managed by ECM programs today. Hell, email is still not being managed by the vast majority of corporations. ECM is playing technical catchup but they are not moving as fast as the technologies they are trying to catch up to. I think AIIM needs to look beyond their own membership to find less partisan answers that their sponsoring vendors (the real money behind AIIM) can use instead of influence. If AIIM was at all correct about the impact of ECM as it applies generally then I'm reasonably certain that Nuxeo would be thriving, instead of what I'm pretty sure is instead on it's deathbed.