AIIM's Members Talk Back
Clark Brady, Eli Lilly and Company
Bill Zoellick, CAP Ventures
One of the best attended sessions at AIIM's annual conference is the look at top emerging technologies by AIIM's own Emerging Technology Advisory Group (EmTAG). EmTAG's charter is to keep AIIM well informed about technological developments before the become critical issues for members, so that AIIM can put programs, background information, and, when necessary, standards efforts in place for the membership. At the annual "Impact of Emerging Technologies" session, EmTAG shares its findings over the past year with conference attendees.
This year EmTAG decided to open up the communication with the conference audience to a two-way dialogue. They constructed a questionnaire designed to find out what AIIM's members see as important and what new problems they are running into as they implement document management in their businesses. The questionnaires were distributed and collected at the start of the conference, enabling EmTAG to report back on the findings in one of the closing sessions. The results are so interesting that EmTAG decided to take extra time to report on them here in Inform, so that all AIIM members can make use of them.
The conference attendees returned 289 surveys during the session. Not all of the surveys were completely filled out, so as you study the results that follow, you will not always find that everything adds up to 289.
WHO?
It is important, of course, to know who is talking to us, so the first question asked the audience to tell us what they did. As the following table and chart illustrate, the respondents are primarily technical managers and developers, with a good proportion of consultants mixed in.
1. Which best describes your position?
Technical Manager 93
Consultant 55
Developer/Programmer 50
End User/Client 34
Business Manager 26
Write In
Project Manager 8
Records Manager 3
Other 17
This means that we have a group that is very well qualified to speak to the technological issues facing member companies: we've got the right group for looking down the road a bit.
DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY: HOW AND WHY?
The next questions were designed to tell us about how new technologies are bought and developed.
2. How is new technology introduced into your organization?
MIS/IT up to execs 123
End users/line of business 81
Centralized Advanced 53
Technology Group
Execs down to MIS/IT 25
As you can see, the place where the ball starts rolling is in the MIS or IT department or with the line of business. The clear suggestion to vendors is that selling to the executives first is not yet a winning strategy.
The answers to this question are also an indication that the document management market is maturing. Typically, in an early market, most selling is to end users and to the line of business. You convince them that your new technology will save them money or speed up their processes, and then they pilot it or make initial installations. Only when the technology becomes better established does it appear on the radar screens of MIS and IT, which, since they deal with maintaining systems across the enterprise, tend to be more conservative. The results above, coming from a group looking at document technologies, suggest that document technologies have already moved into the MIS/IT domain. This is good news for the market, since this should enable faster growth.
3. How does your company develop document management applications?
Contractor/Integrator 129
In-house Development 107
Organization is a vendor, integrator, or VAR 43
4. What are the key considerations for applying new technology in your business?
Solution (ignore underlying technologies) 98
Embedded (App with integrated technology) 76
Tools (VBX/OCX, DLL, API) 107
Base Technology (Develop from Standards) 42
Off the shelf (No major changes to software) 100
Integrated (Mix purchased software with 216
internal development)
The answers to questions 3 and 4 tell us that a large amount of the integration and development for document management is done in-house - this is still something of a home-builder market. It is not surprising, then, that there is a fair amount of emphasis on the tools, interfaces, and APIs provided by a vendor when making a buying decision. This is probably a reflection of the fact that document management solutions still tend to vary considerably from company to company. In the face of that, it is an encouraging sign that a significant number of the respondents are looking at off the shelf solutions. Again, that is an indicator of more general acceptance of document management and of good potential for growth.
TOP EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
This is where we asked the audience "What's hot?" We asked the users to rank the top emerging technologies, with "1" as the highest ranking. The answers are interesting, and even a little surprising.
5. What are the Top 3 Emerging Technologies impacting your
business in the next year? 1s 2s 3s >3
Document Management 64 50 43 22
Web Tools 48 33 37 32
Workflow 40 47 43 26
Image Management 37 34 23 19
High Speed Networks 13 20 17 10
Storage Technology 12 16 17 15
Groupware 9 12 11 13
OO Dev Tools 9 6 11 7
Compound Documents 4 14 16 9
Intelligent Agents 3 5 14 7
Video Conferencing 1 3 11 3
Color FAX 1 0 2 2
Other 4 4 3 6
Document management has clearly emerged as the key technology that this group of AIIM members is focused on, displacing image management by a wide margin. This is consistent with findings by market analysts such as CAP Ventures, Delphi Consulting, Meta, Gartner, and others that although image management is a large and relatively mature market, document management (revisable forms) is where all the growth is.
We found the emphasis on Web tools, ahead of workflow and image management, to be particularly interesting. This is a new concern, and is a market area which many of AIIM's vendor members are only beginning to address. It appears to be an area with significant opportunities for vendors who can successfully integrate this concern with document management technology.
CHARACTERISTICS OF EXISTING SYSTEMS
EmTAG also asked the respondents to describe the systems that they have in place: how long have they had them, how hard was it to build them, and what did they cost?
6. Describe the following kinds systems in your
organization Count Min Avg Max
Image Mgmt - Months In Use 101 1 29.2 99
Image Mgmt - Months to Imp 86 1 10.3 60
Image Mgmt - Cost in Thousands 91 2 4272.2 99999
Doc Mgmt - Months In Use 65 1 24.8 99
Doc Mgmt - Months to Implement 87 1 10.3 60
Doc Mgmt - Cost in Thousands 76 1 3235.4 80000
Workflow - Months In Use 42 1 25.3 99
Workflow - Months to Implement 73 1 8.0 24
Workflow - Cost in Thousands 48 1 4203.2 60000
Groupware - Months In Use 39 1 21.6 57
Groupware - Months to Imp 23 2 7.9 24
Groupware - Cost in Thousands 32 1 4738.5 50000
Not surprisingly, more respondents had image management systems than document management systems, and, on average, they have been around longer. What is a little more surprising is that document management systems took no longer to implement than the image management systems and actually cost less. This could, however, be simply a reflection of differences in scale: it seems likely that the image management systems, being more mature, are addressing larger numbers of documents across more of the enterprise.
The average cost of any of these kinds of systems is quite high - between $3M and $5M. This fits the market profile suggested by earlier questions: these are high-end systems, often richly customized, focused on solving specific problems.
DRIVERS AND BARRIERS
Why do companies buy these systems, and what are the barriers to wider adoption? We asked. In each case, "1" indicates "most important."
7. What are the most critical document management issues facing your company
in the next year? 1s 2s 3s >3
Controlling Documents 84 67 19 16
Workflow 60 62 38 24
Retrieving Archived Documents 58 48 49 21
Putting Documents together 14 23 22 24
Other 16 3 8 7
8. What are the major impediments to implementing new
technologies in your company? 1s 2s 3s >3
Cost 85 50 23 29
Resistance to change 44 45 21 23
Lack of Standards 30 20 19 24
Lack of Mgmt Buy In 26 31 30 14
Too Much reorganization 17 24 20 21
Low/No return 16 25 21 18
Lack of Applications 6 8 7 17
Not Applicable 3 6 5 11
Other 19 10 5 7
For this group, document "control" was the key perceived benefit of document management, followed by the closely related concepts of workflow (a different kind of control, in a way) and retrieval (if you can't find it, you're not controlling it.) It is interesting that this group is less interested in the document assembly problem, which it to say that they are less interested in the publishing side of document management.
We were a little surprised by this, given the emphasis on web management in an earlier question. We tend to think of web management as a very large assembly and publishing problem. But, to be fair, the question limited the horizon to the coming year. It could be that, over that time, customers are assuming that the "assembly" of the web site would still be done in an ad hoc way using HTML links as necessary, and that the primary problem at the moment is making sure that you have the right information on the web page. Perhaps the suggestion is that companies will turn to being concerned with the integrity of the whole web site only when the basic control problem is solved.
Not surprisingly, given the $3M + cost of current systems, cost is viewed as the major barrier to more use of document management, apparently apart from matters such as the rate of return. Even if the systems can be shown to pay out over time, they just cost too much in the first place. This is consistent with findings in CAP Ventures user studies that it is the initial rather than the overall cost that gets in the way of purchase. The early signs of acceptance of off-the-shelf solutions that we saw in an earlier question will help bring costs down, since it is the system analysis and integration costs that drive the overall price up most quickly.
DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT APPLICATIONS
We also asked where their companies would be deploying document management in the near term. Respondents were asked to mark every area where there would be activity; consequently the total number of responses is greater than 289.
9. Within what areas in your company will you implement new
document technologies in the coming year?
Finance and Accounting 124
Customer Service 110
Human Resources 78
Engineering 72
Systems 65
Research and Development 62
Executive Management 59
Sales 54
Manufacturing 35
Given the large emphasis that a number of document management vendors are putting into penetration of the manufacturing market, and the successes that they are having there, these results are a little surprising. We do not, of course, know anything about the companies represented by the respondents, and so it is possible that this is simply a refection of unexpected sample bias. It does seem clear, in any case, that finance and accounting are areas where the cost justification is already in place for many companies, and should therefore be on any vendor's short list of key vertical markets.
THE WEB
The Internet, intranets, and web related issues were highly visible in EmTAG's own list of key developments, and so we decided to ask the conference attendees how they were using webs and what kind of access they had. Respondents were asked to mark all of the answers that applied.
10. What best describes your company's usage of the World Wide Web?
WWW surfing 155
Text Searching 144
Interface to DataBase 78
Interface to Document Mgmt 50
System
Discussion groups 39
Transaction/Form Processing 38
11. What Internet access do you have?
External Internet 166
Company intranet 137
Personal Account 108
Clearly, the most frequent use of the web back in early April, when we did this survey, was for getting information (surfing and searching). More than half of the respondents indicated that each of these were key activities.
However, even at that time early this year, the number of respondents also using the web as part of their regular infrastructure, as a way to access data bases or document management systems, was already substantial. The web is already a significant part of the document management landscape for AIIM's members. This is confirmed by the large number of respondents that have Internet and intranet access through their company.
WHO OWNS THE DESKTOP?
We knew that Windows in one form or another was the dominant desktop system for AIIM members, but we wanted to get a sense of the degree to which this is true.
12. What primary desktop operating system will your company use
next year?
Windows 3.x 166
Windows NT 155
Windows 95 135
UNIX 87
OS/2 41
Macintosh 37
Two things are interesting about this result. First, the Macintosh is clearly dropping off the chart as a primary system. Second, Windows 95 is already surpassed by NT as a desktop operating system among this group of companies.
We also note the large share of users that will still be committed to Windows 3.x. We are writing this in July, having already seen evidence of a general slowdown in the PC hardware business. With 20-20 hindsight, we could now "predict" from this survey that the replacement of older hardware with new systems capable of running 32-bit operating systems would come more slowly than originally expected.
CONCLUSIONS
This is clearly an area of rapid change and a great deal of commercial activity - that is in the nature of work with emerging technologies and markets. The "snapshot" that AIIM's EmTAG took of the AIIM membership provides us with the following picture of the population we serve, as of earlier this year:
The focus of AIIM's members has shifted decisively from image management to document management. The market for these document management products is already showing strong signs of moving into a more mature phase (where growth will pick up even more). For example, the impetus for purchase is originating more from MIS and IT than from individual business units, and there are the beginnings of interest in off the shelf packages.
At the same time, the results show this to be very much a market in transition: there is still a lot of emphasis on mixing purchased software with internal development. Cost is the major barrier to broader deployment of document management. The largest near term opportunities appear to be in Financial and Accounting applications.
The web and intranets are emerging with tremendous speed as an infrastructure that will impact AIIM members and define the shape of document management. Intranets have the potential to open up the document management offerings, making them more interoperable, thus bringing down costs and moving the market forward to the next level of growth.
| Last Modified: Aug 6,1996 Page Maintained by Clark Brady {cbrady@iquest.net} |