1. Next Generation Enterprise Content Management
Systems
What does the future look like for our enterprise clients looking to modernize
their content management capabilities? Here’s what clients are looking for:
• More agility
• low cost
• Rich metadata and analytics
• A simplified approach to information governance
More agility
Getting applications up and running quickly is key. This includes connecting
content repositories to other lines of business applications. This means better
integration optionsmore configuration than construction; For example,
connecting to Salesforce, and Workday.

2. Low cost
Persistently, ECM systems have been over $1,000 per user per year.
Considering this, most customers are analyzing cloud options. Inexpensive
storage like Amazon’s AWS or SaaS offerings like Box offer a low cost of
ownership. Yet often the migration and migration costs to get to these
advanced platforms eat up the savings in the short term.
Rich metadata and analytics capabilities
With so much content, it’s time to generate insights from the data stored in
content repositories. Whether that means extracting data from documents upon
ingestion, or discovering data within historical artifacts, new and emerging
applications require more metadata and full-text renditions.
A simplified approach to information governance
The ability to enable basic records management functionality is expensive both
in terms of cost to enable applications to manage records (especially records
with event-based retention triggers), and in many cases, depending on the
user’s time and effort.
Now, add concerns about keeping too much personal information, and you
realize that information governance is more important than ever. What can be
done to reduce the cost of implementing these critical capabilities? Most
participants agreed that focusing only on the basics could keep both costs and
implementation timelines reasonable. The basics here include simplifying the
retention schedule with larger retention buckets and less complex event-based
triggers and moving records into fewer, manageable repositories.
The speed and path of the cloud varybut is inevitable
And of course, the conversation at many venues resulted in an exchange of
experiences with deployments in the cloudsome of which are beyond what
traditional ECM vendors offer. A major financial services player is using
Amazon S3 for notifications and text, while S3 is using open-source search from

3. Elasticsearch and Cabana’s visualization capabilities to search storage. Another
example is a large insurance company participant using Amazon.
All participants have some form of content management system deployed in the
cloudeither in pilot mode or in full production. But a full transition will take
years, given that the number of disparate content repositories and the age of
many systems makes direct ports to the cloud problematic. But make no
mistake, cloud applications and deployments offer a wide array of capabilities to
meet the above business objectives.
Conclusion
The path to next-generation ECM is not straightforward. Thankfully,
entrepreneurs who have been in the trenches have important lessons to share.
If you are a strategic ECM practitioner, reach out and let us know. We will
invite you to the conversation.