As the pendulum swings - Users vs. the Enterprise

There have been two traditional enemies of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) adoption:

1. Email
2. Shared network folders/drives

For most users in an enterprise (i.e. staff), it is simply easier to send a file to a colleague through email than it is to first deposit the file and then send a link instead.

In the early 2000's, progress was made to close the usability gap so that it was nearly as easy to deposit and send a link as it was to send directly. Enterprises were motivated to encourage or even require this user behavior by compliance requirements (e.g. SOX), especially in some industrial (e.g. 21 CFR Part 11 in the life sciences sector) and government sectors. The effort was made feasible by the fact that in the majority of cases, the files were in either Microsoft Office or PDF formats, and that each enterprise typically had standardized email system, often MS Exchange or Lotus Notes. ECM systems provided easy approaches that tied the two together.

Similarly, with shared network folders, users found it very easy to just create a folder that they needed, then share it with a few colleagues as required. But this is highly non-scalable, even for individual users, who quickly have access to hundreds of poorly named and unmaintained folders and files. The benefits of bringing some standardization to the naming and maintenance of folders and files, with audit trails and version control, became an ECM adoption driver that even many users supported. Enterprises saw the efficiency benefits of making current and relevant information more readily available to staff in support of their work.

But in recent year the pendulum has very much swung back in favor of the end user with the consumerization of enterprise IT.

On the email front, most staff have ready access to Cloud email services such as Gmail, even if their enterprise-sanctioned email service goes down. And increasingly staff are creating content in other formats (i.e. not Office or PDF) that are supported by these email services, or other services that provide new types of content such as blogs, microblogs, wikis, videos, etc. And they are often doing this on devices that they personally supply (e.g. smart phones and tablets).

And on the shared folder front, dedicated Cloud services such as Dropbox and Box.net are making very significant in-roads into enterprises, even if they are not sanctioned. Users simply take the easier and arguably the best way (from a personal efficiency perspective) to get their jobs done. They gain ready access to 'their' files wherever they are and on whatever device they use.

Clearly the 'pendulum' has swung very much towards the needs of end users in recent years. But the return swing is inevitable. It will likely be driven by:

1. Disclosure disasters to come (think Wikileaks 'on steroids'), that will force enterprises to be enforce processes,
2. Growing process confusion and inefficiencies as the number of consumer-oriented services used by staff continue to grow, and by
3. Enterprise software vendors moving to adopt the best features of consumer software to the needs of enterprises.