more casual manner or in collaborative and dynamic work spaces, it is challenging to
develop business rules that incorporate an organization's legal obligations for
declaration and classification of "official" content. It is even more challenging to
apply the rules to casual content, mixed, or dynamic content (part casual, part
official). Intelligent text analysis and the automated application of complex business
rules are still unable to meet document classification requirements with an adequate
level of accuracy. One result has been to reduce the number of categories into a few
"big buckets" to increase the level of accuracy of auto-categorization.
Management is not yet ready to spend enough money to train users and provide the
time for them to properly identify and organize existing content, including declaring
and classifying these documents as records. Advanced search and categorization
tools will become more and more critical in 2008 as a means of searching through
the chaos of desktop, shared drive, e-mail, and document repositories to classify
existing documents.
Dramatically
The jury is no longer out on the extent of "Enterprise" Records Management project
funding. Senior management finally views compliance and associated records
management as something that needs to be funded for large scale implementation.
Investment in enterprise records management accelerates dramatically in 2008
especially as big companies try to extend their paper-based file plans and retention
schedules to E-mail and SharePoint repositories.
Federated Records Management solutions allow an enterprise to have one (or
perhaps a handful of) RM implementations to manage the multiplicity of content and
document repositories. It is clear that corporations are very interested in solving
their enterprise records problems, and the tools that are available are beginning to
scale to meet the needs of an enterprise. Increasingly, the enterprise competitions
for records management have been reduced to the leading ECM suite vendors (IBM,
EMC, OpenText, and Microsoft). The smaller records management vendors are
either disappearing or are providing integrations with the ECM vendors to solve
niche problems. OmniRIM's integrations with IBM, Microsoft and EMC to provide
both paper and federated records management capabilities are an important example
of how a smaller RM vendor can solve critical problems for large organizations in
the Federated RM arena.
All in all, this promises to be another exciting year of growth for the enterprise
content and records management industries. Fasten your seatbelts.