Trends In Enterprise Content Management Outsourcing By Craig LeClair, Forrester

Business pains are driving the emergence of ECM outsourcing services.

The majority of today's ECM outsourcing services currently takes place in transactional content areas that include scanned images and other incoming information from eforms and faxes, print streams generated from back-office applications, output management, and electronic records that for legal purposes must be kept for extensive time periods. Much of this content originates outside an organization from external parties—customers or partners—and relies on workflow or BPM to drive transactional, back-office business processes.

Business content ECM initiatives such as team collaboration and document management to support R&D, or contract management in support of corporate legal environments, remain in-house initiatives for most enterprises. Similarly, persuasive content ECM initiatives such as the use of WCM to support multi-channel marketing or customer self-service remain in-house initiatives. Most enterprises are just now coming to grips with how to leverage this content in their large and varying employee and customer constituencies. In addition, user interactions and use cases are not as mature or standardized as for transactional content, making it hard for ECM outsource service providers to replicate a service across multiple clients.

Craig Le Clair is a senior analyst at Forrester. His current focus is on providing advice to information management specialists, business process professionals, IT architects, and customer experience professionals. His technology coverage areas include information management and ECM. Previously, Craig was a vice president at ADP, where he focused on next-generation solutions for the company's document management business. He was also a co-founder of docHarbor. Craig has deep experience in the software industry, having authored How to Succeed In the Enterprise Software Market, published in 2005.