Content and File Sharing is not enough: Innovation through Social Collaboration

When reading this article, I am smiling. Structured Enterprise Content Management and Social Collaboration were always overlapping. What do you collaborate about? Very often documents. How are you dong this? Fore structured workflows perhaps with the support of a Business Process Management Tool. For unstructured, more adhoc alike challenges (hopefully) through Enterprise Social Networking. Sometimes – not to seldom – through using  tools, users know from their private „Web 2.0“ life. Loosing security, a compliance nightmare, but to be fair, some of the vendors go enterprise. And – to be very realistic – most of the times through … email – attaching files to an email, while completely loosing control of versions and status of a process.

Yes, this needs to change. Since more than 20 years. We need a new way to work in the Digital Age. We always needed it. Now it ist the time. Mobile has not only changed the user experience. Mobile is breaking down the silos between traditional ECM systems and state-of-the-art enterprise file sharing solutions? Wrong. This can only be the first step. It is not about file sharing only. This may be a first step. It is about innovation through social collaboration.

Why am I smiling? Just before my previous employer FileNet was being acquired by IBM our new corporate tagline was „Better decions faster“.  At this time I was – to be honest – not to convinced about this message. Now with systems like IBM Watson becoming more and more powerful, I might need to revise my scepticism.

Here are some facts and expectations from IDC:

Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) is converging with team collaboration applications and the case management segment of enterprise content management (ECM). The convergence will create a $6.2 billion opportunity by 2019, International Data Corporation (IDC) researchers predict.

This content collaboration software market will likely grow at a 13.4 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2014 and 2019, …

Enterprises will need to connect unstructured, ad hoc collaboration with structured content-centric business processes, especially for decision making, IDC researchers Melissa Webster and Vanessa Thompson noted. …

„There are too many silos, and they need to manage information more strategically. ..“

The IDC researchers said the future of content collaboration lies in the intersection between structured work in ECM and unstructured sharing in EFSS. …

The IDC also found content collaboration in the public cloud is expected to experience a CAGR of 23.1 percent, while on-premises growth is flat at 0.8 percent.

„The cloud changes everything,“ …

Source: Content Collaboration Software: A $6.2B Business