Alfresco Outlines Trends Reshaping ECM

Aug 6, 2015 12:22:28 PM

By Lee Davis

John Newton, CTO and founder of ECM vendor Alfresco, recently told his webinar audience that there are four trends reshaping ECM requirements. BLI was on the call, and here are the key takeaways.

1. The new ways of working
Newton explained how 37 percent of the world’s workforce will be mobile in 2015, and that by 2020, 75 percent of the workforce will be Millennials. Based on these trends, Newton expects the younger work force – which he refers to as “digital natives” – will demand easy to use systems that support anywhere-access from mobile devices.

2. Extended enterprise
No longer will legacy ECM systems confine employees behind a firewall. They will be free to collaborate with customers, contractors, suppliers, and others thanks to the two-way information sharing capabilities offered by an inter-connected web. Businesses recognize that collaboration is key, and hence are pushing to unshackle themselves from IT and productivity constraints, as well as eliminating issues with virtual private networks (VPNs).

3. An explosion in digital content
Newton is amazed at the explosion of digital content he has witnessed in his life. Citing data from IDC, he claims that digital content will grow by 50-fold between 2010 and 2020. And as the tech industry continues to grow at an extraordinary pace, traditional content such as PDFs and office docs will share more space in an environment populated with content in other formats such as images, social, and collaborative forms. Additionally, more context will be used to identify content. Today, IDC reports that 44 percent of workers don’t know where to locate information that is necessary to complete their jobs. Newton claims that innovations in meta-data such as geo-location (storing where the document was saved) will help workers find the information need.

4. A new IT infrastructure
The recent technological wave comprised of virtualization, cloud computing, and mobile technologies are battering the shores of the business world. As a result, businesses are jumping ship, opting for cloud based solutions. The future is a hybrid of on-premises deployment, private and public clouds, and virtualized environments.