How and why has Asia emerged as a key growth target for enterprise content management solutions? Please explain.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) in Asia Pacific (ex-Japan) has been forecasted to grow between 13-20 per cent year on year according to Gartner Dataquest, Market Trends: ECM report for 2007-2012. This is significant compared to a 5-11 per cent yearly growth rate in Japan and North America or even a 12% yearly growth rate projection for the global market by 2012.
In a detailed analysis of growth and trends in the ECM market, Gartner stated that the worldwide ECM software license and maintenance revenue represented a $2.9 billion market in 2007. Gartner predicts that total software revenue in the ECM market will grow at a compound annual rate of 12.2 percent through 2012. The ECM market is set to follow the growth of the Customer Relationship Market (CRM) market. Strong demand for knowledge management, business intelligence and better customer experience is powering the need for better ECM measures and solutions in the market.
What are the key factors stimulating Asia's growth in ECM?
The developing maturity of the Asian market is the primary factor. With more mature and technology savvy countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand and China adopting enterprise applications, the ECM market is growing steadily in the region.
The market sectors include banking, finance, government/regulatory agencies, education, media, healthcare, telecoms and transportation industries where the push for digital strategies, the growth of data sources and management of knowledge are all becoming key issues
Asian countries have been growing steadily economically for the last decade. Where there is economic growth, there will be growth in communications flow and content across various communications channels. This in turn requires governments to invest in either new infrastructure as well as replace legacy systems in order to support and contain increased content and information that result from increased economic activity.
In addition, we now see more small and medium sized business becoming ECM savvy. These smaller businesses recognise the value and relevance of ECM as part of an overall strategy for growth.
Another key business driver is compliance and governance requirements, as a result of legislation, that contributes significantly to growth in adoption. As we increasingly migrate to a digital communications platform, developing legislation ensures greater digital compliance. As a result content management and digital assets management become key issues for enterprises.
What role does 'technology shifts' has in stimulating the need for ECM?
Technology shifts are significant in changing behaviour, creating new trends and re-shaping the way we view the world. In today's environment the following behavioural shifts instigated by technology will have the maximum impact on adoption of ECM.
Today we work in an "era of peak e-mail". Most if not all of our communications, centre on the e-mail. In an increasingly distributed environment, the more we communicate via the digital medium the more we support the growth of ECM. Content management becomes critical in managing digital assets including e-mail based content, other multimedia content as well web content.
Secondly outsourced applications and storage is fast becoming globally accepted and with that acceptance comes the need to manage the enterprise's knowledge and information content. Without an effective management application or tool, enterprises will not be able to take advantage of outsourcing.
The mobile age has begun. Enterprises today spend more time and resources developing systems and processes to manage the digital and mobile environment for their customers, partners and employees. Mobility is the key in a distributed organisation where employees, partners and customers are working in real time to address issues.
This is further exacerbated with the recruitment today of the "Generation Y" workforce into the enterprises. This segment of the workforce is highly connected, mobile and demands immediate results or action. In such a structure, the need to manage content, share it effectively and to empower the work flow is the key to success. ECM becomes a critical element.
The changing demographics is compelling enterprises to invest in tools to collect, encourage, publish and distribute content within the organisation and externally from subject matter experts. The shift to Web 2.0 strategies from enterprises and corporations means there is a real need to manage the risks - appropriate use policies, content approval, security, capture and management are integral issues. ECM can help manage this for corporate executives.
What impact will the current economic downturn have on the ECM market in Asia?
We expect the current downturn in Asia to slow the pace of adoption naturally. But ECM is even more critical now then before.
With mobile content and digital technologies converging and digital technology adoption continuing its growth, especially in countries like China, India and emerging markets of Asia, the need to publish, share, distribute, regulate and manage content and information will continue to put pressure on enterprises. The need for ECM is not merely an economic need but a societal, organisational and behavioral challenge.
Open Text’s growth continues in Asia. The economic downturn has not depressed nor deterred growth of data and content in any or our operating markets as yet.
What are some of the major downsides for enterprises that don't properly implement ECM solutions?
It is estimated that some 10 per cent of the information in any organisation is numbers in a database. Normally this information is very important and it relates to the transactions that the organization is involved in. However, 90 per cent of the information is unstructured data or words. This means that the dominant source of information in an organization is in word form. Not surprisingly, this is how people collaborate with each other. We use numbers to describe transactions not how things and people interact and collaborate.
While this is important, what makes unstructured data the focus of IT for the future is the astounding growth rates of digital content that are being reported with main stream adoption of the internet. It is estimated that large corporations are doubling their unstructured data every two months. Even if this rate slowed to every 3 months or every 6 months, it represents an enormous change in the location of information that is available for use within an organisation.
Given the sheer scale of change and growth, enterprises not implementing ECM solutions stand to lose a lot. Besides the business process efficiencies and added competitive edge, enterprises can suffer from loss of revenue, legal and legislative implications as a result of non-compliance, and in the extreme cases loss of employee productivity, morale and retention.
What good examples can you highlight, of Asian companies that are successfully using ECM and what results are they achieving?
The following are a sample set of clients across the region in various industry sectors that have successfully implemented ECM solutions from Open Text and have seen significant ROI and efficiencies in their business operations.
a. Hong Kong
• China Light & Power – Utility
b. India
• Credit Rating Information Services of India - Financial Services
c. Indonesia
• Excelcomindo – Telecommunications
d. Korea
• LG – Manufacturing
• Samsung –Manufacturing
e. Malaysia
• Maxis – Telecommunications
• Telekom Malaysia –Telecommunications
f. Singapore
• Sony – Manufacturing
• Conoco Phillips – Energy
• Daimler Chrysler - Manufacturing – Auto
g. Thailand
• PTT-AR (includes Star Petroleum) - Mining & Energy
• CP Group – Conglomerate
How do you see the environment in 2009 for ECM approaches and what advice do you have for senior IT execs relating to their approach to ECM?
We all witnessed the rise and fall of focus around Knowledge Management in the nineties, so how and why can we do better this time?
Now that the technology is well advanced, users’ expectations are high as they are more comfortable with technology. In the nineties, knowledge management was a way to teach databases to work with words rather than numbers. Today, we are talking about integrated ECM platforms that cover all aspects of collaboration (virtual meeting rooms, immediate capturing of results, sharing and markups, indexing and search functionality across platforms and languages) and bringing structured and unstructured information together.
Importantly smart organisations are realizing that they cannot deploy KM and ECM solutions successfully by applying project and people management principles alone, they must do more.
Creating a world of collaboration, of exchanging information, ideas and concepts. This is what we at Open Text believe ECM can do for an organisation. Only if managers and business owners are not afraid to appeal and relate to their employees real values. Answer employees real wish to make a real contribution, cater to their pride in sharing knowledge and a desire to openly discuss new ideas. It is mind shift that managers and business owners need to engage in before ECM can make a difference.
Senior IT executives need to recognise that their consumers (ie the organisation) are going to move ahead in the digital age. To be able to share, collaborate and more importantly manage their role is more a facilitator, one of empowering and enabling through technology not one of control. Gone are the days when technology was unwieldy, cumbersome and requiring three weeks training! Today, internet based technologies, communications platforms given a boost through the social networking phenomenon, are powering employees and galvanising them to take those new concepts to the working environment. Instead of fighting it, resisting change, IT executives need to learn to adapt and appreciate those technologies like ECM can enliven, empower and engender growth for the organisation.
John Kan is Vice President Asia, Open Text.
Note: Gartner positions Open Text in the Leaders Quadrant in the Magic* Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management, (co-authored by Karen M. Shegda, et al., published September 23, 2008)
