A Recap of 2010 Highlights for AIIM and ECM – and Thank You

We would like to take this opportunity to do three things. Firstly, report back to the readers of this blog and the broader content and records management community on the “State of the Association.”

Secondly, but even more importantly, thank you for your support, involvement, and guidance during these challenging times.

And lastly, take a moment on behalf of the Board and the staff to wish you and yours a very Happy Holiday and extend our best wishes for a happy and successful 2011.

Like many of you, we entered 2010 with great concerns given the recession and overall market conditions.  We are happy to report looking back on the year that it has been very successful – a great year, in fact. AIIM has weathered the economic storms well (everyone knock on wood!), and we succeeded in investing in the middle of the recession in the future of the association and the industry.

When we sold the AIIM Show back in 2002, we embarked on a multi-year effort to build an Association focused around four key competencies:

1. Networking – to provide meaningful member, on-line, and in-person opportunities to connect, exchange information, and create and share meaningful nest practices and standards.
2. Professional Development – to create a consistent industry framework to train users, the channel, and vendors on the core technologies and practices in our space.
3. Market Education – to provide quality information about the industry and its solutions to end-users, delivering this information at low or no cost to the end-user.
4. Market Research – to quantify the drivers for our technologies, the user experience in procuring and using these technologies, and the ROI of our industry’s solutions.

By and large, this was the year that a number of these initiatives came together. Our work is not yet done – our technologies are mature, our market is not! – but there are a number of highlights we’d like to report. The list is by no means conclusive, but in the spirit of the 12 days of Christmas, here are 12 major items…

1. In terms of basic numbers, we now have 72,200 basic members and 5,300 professional members, up significantly over 2009. This is the first year since we sold the AIIM Show back in 2002 (when professional membership was embedded in Conference attendance) that we have topped 5,000 professional members. There are 34 AIIM chapters, and they hosted a total of 160 local events in 2010.

2. We launched 4 new on-line communities – 1) Enterprise 2.0; 2) Capture and Imaging; 3) Electronic Records Management; and 4) SharePoint. Users have provided over 2,400 product ratings on these sites (along the lines of TripAdvisor). Each community is driven by a network of Expert Bloggers, providing unparalleled insight, commentary, and guidance. Since the launch of the first two communities in May, 86,172 unique visitors have participated in these communities.

3. We launched World Paper Free Day on October 28, and collaborated with 11 chapters and volunteers around the world to produce over 20 events worldwide. We are in the planning stages for 2011 and hope to take this grassroots event to the next level.

4. In the standards arena, we published 2 ISO standards; 2 white papers on PDF Healthcare use with Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) document format and produced 1 AIIM Standards webinar and 1 PDF/A seminar – as well as sustaining the ongoing legacy ISO standards and best practices in our trust.

5. In the training arena, we passed the 17,000-student mark in 2010. Over 42% of our training business is now on-line, reflecting the migration of professional development to the web. 3,200 students took 4,511 courses in 2010 alone.  We also launched an Electronic Records Management Master virtual class and Master Prep virtual classes for Enterprise Content Management and Electronic Records Management. We launched translations of our core ECM curriculum in Portuguese, German, and Russian.

6. In 2010 we launched our 7^th core training competency, focused on the role of SharePoint in an ECM strategy. This course – developed by the Gimmal Group – has proven to be a top seller and is receiving top marks for content that is at exactly the right point technically to be relevant to IT people and simultaneously meaningful to business people.

7. Our Content Management Seminar Series (often called “the Roadshow”) continued to set the standard for effective local events in both the US (run by AIIM) and in the UK (run by a partner organization, Revolution). The 13 cities in the US and Canada, and 4 in the UK – focused on the “8 Things You Need to Know to Build an Effective Information Management Strategy” -- generated a total of 5,841 registrations and is a major source of “new blood” into the membership.

8. One of our most highly-rated user programs is our Webinar Series. We host events virtually every week (37 total in 2010), in both North America and in Europe. Registrations through the end of November totaled 18,912, a new record. In addition to the live events, the archives of the webinars are a top draw on the AIIM website. Our webinars also attract a significant number of new members.

9. We have now published five e-books in our popular “8 things” series, on 1) social networking and content management; 2) getting rid of paper; 3) SharePoint; 4) ECM and ERM implementation; and 5) ECM and ERM strategy. The content was originally gathered on the AIIM blog, and contributed by a host of users and industry experts and analysts. The content is published under Creative Commons – you can host a copy of any e-book on your own web site to assist in your own traffic generation. You can subscribe to email updates from the blog via a (free) Digital Landfill e-mail subscription (second column, second item).

10. Our Industry Research program published 11 titles in 2010, 5 in the popular Industry Watch series. This information, provided at no cost to end-users, is paid for through sponsorships. There were 10,139 downloads of our Industry Watch reports in 2010, and the research was featured in a long list of industry press reports and presentations.

11. At the heart of our industry, evangelism is a commitment to using social tools.  This commitment reaches deep into the organization, as is evident from the visibility that AIIM content receives on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube. We experimented with Twitter as a community organizing tool, and our first “Tweetjam” on E20 reached 44,000 people in June; our second prior to World Paper Free Day on October 22 reached 57,000 people. We also launched a special AIIM Channel on Slideshare to aggregate the many presentations we make during the course of the year and make them available to the broader community.

12. Lastly, we successfully created a Task Force of leading companies, raised funds from these companies, and retained Geoffrey Moore (author of best-seller Crossing the Chasm) to assist the Task Force in building a future history of the content industry relative to social technologies. This work led to the public release of a series of presentations, first to the first-ever joint meeting of the North American and European Advisory Trade Members and the AIIM Board, and then in October to the general public and a “Future of ECM” webinar in December. A white paper is scheduled for early January.

    These materials have been used in a number of staff presentations to better position AIIM relative to future industry directions, and have served as the basis for creating a new product initiative centered around Systems of Engagement, headed by Jesse Wilkins. We believe that the body of knowledge in ECM on governance, technology, taxonomy, compliance, and security that is the core of AIIM will be increasingly critical for organizations as they tackle the management of new forms of social content.

Which brings us back to the 2^nd and 3^rd reasons for this note.

None of the above would have been possible without the active participation of the community that we are fortunate to serve. Thank you for the trust you put in us to provide the best information possible on how to find, control, and optimize your information.

The past couple of years have been a challenge for all of us.  Please accept our best wishes for a great holiday season as we all reflect on these challenges and our deep hopes that 2011 will be happy, healthy, and successful for you.

With Deep Thanks and Appreciation,

Lynn Fraas, AIIM Chair

John Mancini, AIIM President