2013 Predictions – Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement – What Comes Next?

As many readers know, about two years ago a Task Force of AIIM members worked with Geoffrey Moore (author of Crossing the Chasm, among many titles) to build out a "future history" of the content industry. The intention was to think about how enterprise information technology was changing in the wake of the influx of consumer technologies.

The core "story" went something like this...

Organizations spent much of the past 3 decades building out "Systems of Record."

Technologies evolved a great deal during this first phase -- from mainframes to minis to PCs to the internet -- as did the core objects being managed -- from financials to department processes to documents to web pages. However, at the core of this migration was a continuing focus on building Systems of Record to document who did what to whom, when, and in what context. The transitions looked something like this:

In this world, IT was at the center of deploying enterprise systems, and innovation tended to flow down from large organizations, eventually reaching consumers.

Using another Geoff Moore diagram from Escape Velocity, during this period the Content Management business was very much a "complex systems business," operating on the left "hump" of the diagram below, focused on relatively few customers, dealing with complicated and mission-critical business processes.

Enter Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS) in 2007, and the industry began to change. The left "hump" started to shift to the right. Price points began to change as "content management" became an increasing part of the core infrastructure of the organization. Large vendors from the world of complex content management systems initially dismissed SharePoint as "not really ECM" and then struggled to find their role relative to SharePoint as the SharePoint wave intensified. In addition, a host of new enterprise players emerged, built upon a pay-as-you-go SaaS model, led most notably by Salesforce.com.

Meanwhile, back in the bigger IT market, another revolution was brewing.

Over the past 5 years, consumer technologies have taken center stage relative to innovation and migrated into the enterprise, with far-reaching implications for how organizations use and deploy technology. These new technologies focus on interactions and conversations rather than documents and records and on Systems of Engagement rather than Systems of Record.

So after a long period in which there really was no "consumer" play in the document/content space (the right volume operations "hump" in Geoff's business architecture model), suddenly, one appeared. The focus was not traditional transactionally focused content management, but rather the provision of previously unavailable information management tools for the individual, built upon social and mobile technologies and optimized for the cloud. These were companies with freemium to premium models like Box, Google, Evernote, DropBox, FilesAnywhere, and Yammer.

These new volume operations players had a very different financial model than those from the complex systems world. Per Michael Moon from Gistics, complex systems players focus on making their money on capital expenditures and professional services, with most of the money captured in the early stages of a project -- it is not unusual for 70% of the total revenues for a project to the captured before implementation even occurs. On the flip side, Systems of Engagement (and the mobile devices that go with them) are brought into the enterprise by the business rather than IT, and with far simpler pricing and deployment models. The models typically focus on operating expenditures and capturing the majority of revenues after implementation via an annuity stream.

Initially, IT organizations responded to this dichotomy by either: 1) denying the problem existed (kind of an IT policy re the Dropboxes of the world of "Don't ask, Don't tell); 2) mounting massive resistance and opposition to these tools; 3) allowing adoption, but assuming they would someday get around to the question of integration with existing Systems of Record; and/or 4) some combination of the above.

So the question for this blog post is: What comes next? What are the next chapters in the story of Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement?

We spent some time at the AIIM Board meeting last week exploring this topic, and I'd like to offer some initial thoughts.

The complete story of the next phase in our future isn't written yet, but I would offer that it will center around the "controlled collision" between Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement and will include some version of the following 10 elements:

1. CIOs are beginning to adopt mobile-first and cloud-first strategies for new applications, especially for customer-facing applications, changing the traditional development process.

2. The key to understanding the future role of social technologies in the enterprise is that they will increasingly: 1) be a feature of Systems of Record, not a separate system; 2) either become integrated into core business processes (i.e., the honeymoon period of "social for social's sake" is over) or decline in importance; and 3) ultimately converge with email into a single system.

3. Via migrations from the "right hump," core document, and collaboration technologies are now becoming available via the cloud to a host of organizations that heretofore relied on a chaotic mess of file shares. The trick will be to avoid simply taking c drive and file share digital landfills and moving them to the cloud.

4. True document collaboration (vs. either the poor Word "Track Changes" approach or the chaotic, little editorial control Google Docs approach) will become increasingly important.

5. Effective adoption of social technologies is not just a function of turning them on. Defining use cases, outlining expected behaviors within these use cases, and effectively managing change have just as much to do with success as the technology (check Social in the Flow for details).

6. The "we will never put important information in the cloud" and "we must choose between the cloud and on-prem" militancy is evolving into an awareness that the future lies in a hybrid environment in which information is managed across a continuum of platforms and devices.

7. The concept of synching from the early days of email (remember when we needed to actively manage what we did in email when "connected" and when we were not?) will become increasingly important in thinking about the cloud. As organizations think about strategies that integrate Systems of Record with Systems of Engagement, that link Saas enterprise applications like Salesforce.com to behind the firewall information repositories, and that allow for responsible deployment of social and BYOD technologies, the cloud will increasingly become the "place" in which synching occurs, with ultimate control by the System of Record.

8. In our desire to reassert control, we need to remember than the needs of the business to get things done will always trump our corporate need for control.

9. The Chief Marketing Officer will own more and more elements of the "controlled collision" and will be increasingly important in the intersection between Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement.

10. The SoR and SoE "collision" places an increasing premium on those who have skills to help manage this collision and understand the full picture, namely Information Professionals.

What do you think? What comes next in the "story?"