Blogs

In a recent AIIM Webinar with Colman Murphy of Accellion on Mobile Content Management, we previewed AIIM’s upcoming Mobile Content Management global survey. You can download the Webinar here. We’re also doing a version of the Webinar for the UK and European community on September 12, 2013, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM EDT. You can get details here.

Tracking what your peers are doing today in mobile content management (MCM) will help as you plan your own MCM roadmap. But MCM is a very young, dynamic domain, and the AIIM study is a snapshot of it right now. The territory – MCM – is at a very different stage in its lifecycle than capture and imaging, or workflow and BPM, or even RM and e-discovery. In those domains you can read what your peers are doing and fairly easily get pretty stable Standard Practices and some Best Practices. Those mature domains have experienced veteran users, implementers, and suppliers; and many mature solutions that have been in production for years.

MCM is very different in 2013 and that’s what makes the survey so fascinating:

1. You can’t simply read best or even standard practices off the results. What you see are  mostly clumps of temporary regularities. There are emerging best practices in MCM but they aren’t evident in the data.
2. There are few “been there done that” experienced veteran users, implementers or suppliers for most areas of MCM.
3. There are no mature technologies in the new areas of MCM (versus what MCM connects to – ECM and shared drives).
4. Many of the results reflect the anticipations and planning of folks with low information about the domain, before they’ve done serious roadmap planning, let alone acquisition, implementation, and full mature production.
5. For all these reasons the results are somewhat volatile and subject to change when the respondents get more information, start detailed planning, and begin actually implementing MCM with the real products.

So when you are interpreting these results, consider that the difference between peer surveys around the mature AIIM technologies versus MCM  is like the difference between surveys of 50 year olds  versus 25 year olds  on their planned career path. They both provide tremendous information but you must interpret and use them differently.