More thoughts on 2009

So in my last post I might have mentioned that I'd had my fill of year prediction and round-up stories. And you might also, having probably read nothing but over the last week and a half orgy of chocolate, wine and New Year sales. But I'm afraid there's very little else in the news to talk about at this time of year, as a cursory look at the headlines in the Nationals over the last fortnight will probably attest to. So here goes another attempt to look into the future and discern a few future trends in the content management space.
Firstly, e-discovery. It's already massive in the States, thanks to the ammendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) which broadened the type of documents subject to legal discovery to include all electronically-stored information (ESI). UK companies operating in the States are also beholden to these new rules, which stipulate that word processing documents, e-mails, voice mail and instant messages, blogs, backup tapes and database files are now all subject to legal discovery laws.
Vendors like Autonomy are certainly cashing-in on the projected increase in demand for tools that help to archive and retrieve electronically-stored information. The search giant bought archiving vendor Zantaz and data capture and records management firm Meridio to make it one of the best placed to offer its customers holistic e-discovery solutions. Proactive information risk management will become increasingly front-of-mind for chief executives, especially after a few high profile court cases.
Another one to watch over the coming year is the use of social computing in an enterprise context. Now there is a train of thought that says in an economic downturn CIOs are likely to eschew those riskier projects which involve high up-front costs on as yet largely unproven technologies, and instead concentrate on keeping the lights on, and their jobs. I have probably trailed this one the most over the last few months, however, and I think there are still enough firms out there willing to invest in innovative technologies to propel this model in the corporate sphere. After all, using tools which map the key skills of each member of staff and their relationships with others in an organisation can help drive efficiency and productivity, making the firm more agile and able to respond to business change.
And one final piece of food for thought. Can 2009 be the year of mobile ECM? Well, it would definitely be the next logical step and the opportunities for boosting the efficiency of mobile workers are huge. Phones are certainly becoming powerful enough to handle such tasks, but as yet the vendor community has been rather slow to jump on board. Perhaps the problem, as with all things mobile, lies with a lack of standardisation. The proliferation of mobile devices, operating systems, browsers etc in the mobile sphere is such that ECM applications will struggle to make it in this space until someone takes a lead.