Do you still call your desktop a personal computer? Are you still in the habit of saying you’re going on to the ‘World Wide Web’? Do you hearken back to the glory days of ‘Internet Protocol’?

If so, then you will be pleased to learn that you can soon add another old-fashioned term to your lexicon — and I may shock some readers of the DMCollaborators when I say it’s going to be ‘Enterprise Content Management.’

Sorry if I’ve shocked you there! But life moves on, as does the tech industry and the focus of users. And if our recent AIIM research is right, ECM is likely to soon seem a quaint way to describe what we all do.

But please note – I haven’t said we’re going to stop doing ECM, just as in many ways the terms I gently mocked at the start are all still fit for purpose, when you think about it.

Instead, what’s going to happen – as articulated in research out from the team at AIIM – is that an explosion of content and information is going to usher in a new ‘post-ECM’ Era by 2020.

That should be good news – as should be the fact that our ECM Decisions Industry Watch Report confirms that for more than two-thirds of organisations, ECM/DM is absolutely now ranked as mission-critical, with one in three of the AIIM members who took part in the poll underlying the studies that they’d suffer “serious disruption” after an outage of this tech just one hour. This new data shows that over half (52%) of organisations responding now have three or more ECM/DM/RM systems, with 22% have five or more, for instance.

ECM – past its prime as a term?

So, there’s real commitment here to this way of working. But on the sidelines, enormous changes driven by mobile, analytics, cloud and collaborative technologies just are going to fundamentally alter the way organisations view ECM.

So, it seems to be that there is no doubt that organisations still require their content to be managed properly and the term ‘ECM’ is past its prime as a description of the revolution.

The ECM industry is in need of a new label, in effect; this data points to an industry in transition.

That’s a fascinating idea, when you think about it. What sort of future are we moving towards? Should we start to try and coin a new name for what ECM will morph into now? Will ECM disappear and become part of the general IT and system background, or take a new departure to a very different place altogether?

By John Mancini, President of Market Intelligence firm, AIIM

Find out more by checking out the AIIM reports ‘When Riding a Dead Horse, Dismount!’ and ‘ECM Decisions: strategic options for managing, accessing, and preserving content’