We analysts are never satisfied: we had predicted an AIIM show floor with more energy, vendors with more ROI data in evidence, and solutions with more vertical market utility, and that’s exactly what we got – even with a war in progress and winter making a two-day New York return engagement. But the focus was so back-to-basics that we almost missed the wonkier, tech-for-tech’s-sake aspects of previous shows ... and then realized that this was beside the point anyway.

Here’s a quick rundown of what we saw as the most salient take-aways from the event, and the most important points to ponder.

Return of Records Management
Who would have thought, for example, that records management would become a major theme of the biggest IT computing event in New York? In recent years, AIIM-goers were hard pressed to hear the words “record” and “management” openly in the same sentence. What a difference recession, regulation, and ruined reputations can make!

As of April 14, health care providers were due to start paying a heavy price for non-compliance with the privacy provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. That’s why HIPAA compliance experts – the real and the merely self-proclaimed – have been showing up on software industry panels with the same regularity as retired generals on TV talk shows.

At the same time, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, passed in the wake of the corporate accounting scandals that so dominated headlines in the recent past, is putting “auditability” right up there with scalability and portability on the enterprise software check list. The sight of handcuffed executives marching in a “perp parade” on the morning news obviously has obviously gotten the attention of IT buyers and sellers, and records management is firmly in the center of their radar screens.

As a result, many document management vendors (among them Documentum, FileNET, and Optika) were beating the RM drum, and promising either to use advanced records management to keep its corporate customers out of jail – or help its law enforcement customers put them there!

Putting the “Process” in Any-Document Processing
AIIM ’03 also confirmed that an old concept – structured/unstructured document processing – is finally becoming technological reality. For sure, the market has moved far away from focusing merely on creating and processing standardized forms: the new offerings from such forms stalwarts as Cardiff Software and ScanSoft bear this out in spades. Judging from the capabilities under discussion by the likes of Captiva Software, Kofax (which just acquired the company – Mohomine – whose engine powers the Captiva solution), and SWT, it soon will be practical to process virtually any document that comes into an organization with only a minimum of direct human involvement. (Note to self: thus Microsystems Technology is now called AnyDoc.) The promised ability of current solutions to “learn” new document types on the fly and integrate them into their routine functioning – and thus bring order out of chaos – is very impressive.

While few of the exhibitors we met with actually used the word “process” in describing their solutions, an orientation toward business process improvement was clearly on their minds. With customers clamoring for evidence of real enterprise ROI, it was no surprise that software vendors are probing deeper and deeper into the operations, practices, workflows, and transactions that provide the foundation for their customers’ businesses.

Obstacles & Opportunities
The challenge here is that most of the basic technologies – scanning, indexing, storing, searching – are now commodities, and require a different sort of value-add than the better/faster/cheaper variety that was once good enough. As prices fall and vendors compete on the strength of their improved capabilities, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain profit margins and to distinguish one company from another on the basis of their technology alone. (One notable exception may be Tower Technology, which wrote its new government-oriented records management solution – called Seraph – completely in Java.) In fact, we probably are not far from discovering some vendors who no longer even know in which markets, and against whom, they are really competing: thanks to the emergence of multi-functional converged solutions, the hard-and-fast technology “silos” that once characterized the IT landscape are beginning to crumble, and vendors, users, and investors alike are all seeking new touchstones as a result.

As regular readers know, Kinetic Information believes the answer lies in specifically matching the responses to the vendor question “What business problem do you solve?” and to the customer question “What business problem do you have?” Success in this regard requires a commitment to the process orientation we sensed is emerging at AIIM, and to distinctly non-commodity practical application in the form of consultative selling and, especially at the high end, customized implementation.

A Look Ahead
So what will we see in the booths and conference rooms of AIIM 2004? To start with, we devoutly hope – along with everyone else – that the long-delayed U.S. economic recovery will have finally come to pass. But even if things simply don’t get appreciably worse, we expect corporate purse strings to continue to loosen, and software vendors in the content management space to capture new market opportunities in a number of ways:

• Embracing the enterprise context as well as its content, addressing all the ways business is conducted both within a company and throughout its chain of customer and supplier relationships. Technologically, this means a greater emphasis on such disparate capabilities as enterprise interoperability (EIO) and wireless networking, and a more component-driven, platform-centered approach to system construction.

• Explicitly focusing on business process improvement and – in particular – providing tools and solutions that address the vital role of policy and procedure management. Watch for enhancements to business activity monitoring (BAM) and converged business process management (BPM)/workflow solutions. 

• Intensifying the focus on business value. This sounds obvious, but the recent rocky history of IT implementation confirms that establishing, demonstrating, and maintaining financial and/or operational return it is far from simple. A value strategy needs to encompass dollars-and-cents ROI, the smooth and seamless adaptation of business process to market changes, and improvements in human and system communications – in short, a holistic view aimed at achieving MaxTV^®, our shorthand for Maximizing Total Value.