Neither rain, nor sleet, nor gloom of night kept attendees from the annual AIIM Conference and Exposition this year, and their reward for braving the wintry New York weather was a real opportunity to glimpse the future – possibly not in terms of raw technology, but certainly in terms of vision.

Specifically, the event for the first time featured a track of sessions dedicated to business process management (BPM), and was host to a number of vendors who quietly promoted interoperability rather than content management, imaging, or other allied technologies in their show-floor booths. Add to this the fact that total registrations were reported to be up a whopping 24% from last year (including the On Demand Conference & Expo and Digital Marketing Symposium, which are held concurrently with AIIM), and it did appear that the economic clouds darkening the market’s skies for so long finally were beginning to part.

Kinetic Information believes the process perspective is critical to the future of this corner of IT because of how incredibly commoditized so many of the wares on display have become. Whether you’re poking around content management (with or without the ‘web’ prefix), workflow, imaging, capture, storage, or document processing, you end up seeing pretty much the same thing everywhere you look: the entering of information into an automated system, and the subsequent identification, routing, and archiving of that information for some business purpose. This doesn’t mean these technologies don’t have value – quite the contrary! – but they all do essentially the same thing and they all do it in essentially the same way. Having to compete on this basis makes it incredibly hard to maintain a profit margin because it doesn’t allow vendors to offer multiple pricing levels pegged to functionality and makes it tough for buyers to find compelling reasons to buy one system over another. As one observer put it, “How much faster can we get a scanner to go, and how much straighter can we get the scanned image to be?”

Targeting specific business processes, however, leaves all kinds of room for differentiation and margin because it frees vendors to think creatively about how they can improve the way people work. No longer limited to merely wringing whatever extra performance they can from their core technology, they can zero in on the best ways to address operational issues in particular vertical markets, application areas, or companies of certain sizes, and then tune their technologies to match. This supercharges the vendors’ value propositions by boosting the direct business relevance of what’s being offered. At the same time, it opens the door to best-practice services that are far more strategic to customers – and far more profitable to vendors – than those aimed at implementation and integration.

Working this theme from the other direction were several companies seeking to tie the various technologies together by providing the latest in Web services, J2EE, and .NET products and expertise. Evidently recognizing as we do that a process orientation requires that a combination of functionalities be brought to bear, these companies are new to the “AIIM space” and are, to this observer’s eye, a welcome addition to the show floor. These companies represent both promising potential partners for technology vendors seeking to bolster the value of their offerings, and possible attractive alternatives for customers seeking converged solutions on their own. Better still, a number of the “usual suspects” also spoke intelligently about enterprise interoperability and suggested it is an important part of their product strategy.

In the interest of full disclosure, it must be reported that your humble servant was both a co-chair of the aforementioned BPM conference track and a BPM Best of Show judge for AIIM’s monthly magazine, eDoc. That said, the enthusiasm among attendees and exhibitors alike for process-oriented panels and pitches was obvious to even the most objective show-watcher, an outcome we see in the same light as we do the first robin of spring: a harbinger of a growth season soon to come. Contact Us for More

Kinetic Information is always eager to hear your opinion, too, so please let us know what you think – send us an email, give us a call, or start a conversation in our Client Forum: visit our Web site at www.kineticinfo.com and choose News & Views – KI Client Forum. Thanks!