Though content management association AIIM officially will turn 60 on April 7, its central event, the AIIM Exposition and Conference, seems to have gotten a new lease on life. To be held April 7-9 at New York City’s Javits Center, it’s shaping up to be a vigorous, vehement confab that will be marked by tough-minded dollars-and-cents questions (and even some answers), less tire-kicking and more under-the-hood inspections by technology buyers, and a whole lot of vendor posturing, rivalry, and coalition-building. In other words, it should be fun!

So, as we suit up for what have become non-stop game days of analyst briefings – and as we fine-tune our own presentations – here’s what we’re expecting to see and hear on the show floor and in the conference rooms:

• Vertical marketing aimed at the business manager – Customer case histories will be trotted out with regularity, and actual working industry-specific applications and tools will be demonstrated to convince banks, hospitals, insurers, manufacturers, etc. that vendors feel their pain and weigh their potential gain. Given that departmental and line-of-business managers increasingly are making the call on technology purchases, IT salesmanship today is all about business value.

• Converged solutions and solution alliances – Content management was never a simple sell, and its complexity has grown to the extent that point solutions won’t begin to support a growing business – for a user or for a vendor. Combinations of functionality – capture and management, delivery and storage, preservation, and lifecycle planning – will take center stage. Enterprise players will promise all-embracing service and support, and groups of large and small vendors will rally around XML and other technology standards. Some of this activity will be hype (this is a trade show, after all!), but many of these functional combinations and industry alliances will be worth careful attention. 

• Answers to buyers’ non-negotiable demand: “Show me the ROI!” – The “soft benefits” of improved productivity are great for long-term growth, but CIOs today are looking for short-term reductions (read: immediate) in hard costs. Thus, we’ll see powerful tools for increasing accuracy (reducing regulatory risk and cutting the cost of rework), for simplifying ad hoc content changes (boosting managers’ productivity), and for automating big slices of the content lifecycle (shortening cycle times, eliminating staff and/or limiting new hiring). 

• A focus on interoperability as the engine of ROI – Eliminating systems that don’t work. Getting the systems that do work to work better, and to work better together. Making business sense out of the masses of content that systems and people create at an ever-increasing pace. These are all aspects of what Kinetic Information calls “enterprise interoperability” or EIO, and they all will be hot topics throughout AIIM.

But this year should be different. Though the need to reconcile EIO and ROI still reigns supreme, enough practical evidence now exists to make it increasingly and encouragingly clear that you can make technology pay if you unify your business processes – and you can unify your processes by effectively managing all your content, regardless of the data, business context, technical format, or distribution medium that may be involved. In the “old days” of AIIM, content management centered on effectively putting images on microfilm; more recently, it focused on storing and retrieving “documents” – whatever they are! – from a database. And in the future, who knows? Perhaps we’ll be dealing with instant messaging and Web services as mainstream content technologies.

Whatever the future holds, this year’s event is nigh upon us, and features the added dimension of collocation with two other events: On Demand (digital printing and publishing) and TeleCon Collaborate 2003 (collaboration). So the preliminary vibe is good, and EIO is in the air. So let the games begin! 

Going to AIIM? Come see Kinetic Information President Steve Weissman speak on the subject of Content Management & EIO: Tuesday, April 8 at 3:15pm at the Javits Center in the heart of New York City. Contact Us for More