Jean-Pascal Perrein

Regarding Information Management, and to play the 2010-2011 prediction game, here are some on my point of view:

• Information Governance

Enterprises are now more than ever, aware of the risks and stakes of having the best management of their information. It is not anymore a security aspect; it is clearly a legal and a knowledge aspect that lets innovation, agility and risk management to fully develop. Record management, E-discovery, traceability, content and data system, …, in fact everything that brings efficiency and effectiveness needs to be based on a global common information fundamental. But it brings a lot of complexity to be addressed because of a richly structured but moving organization. This is why information governance will be more and more up to date. With strong sponsors, it will give the opportunity to answer to so many local but unconsidered needs.

• Information on Business processes

There is no doubt technology became very accurate to answer many powerful needs. Business Processes that are the backbone of the enterprise are starting to be considered from an Information point of view.  It is now possible to optimize processes, especially content processes. In fact the E-Government action plan is to help European member states to realize their commitments by 2010, commitments on helping the government to use tools and systems to provide better public services. Who said governments are not managing information, or more likely content … .

• Tools and applications

Of course collaborative tools will continue to develop and bring new ways to work; enterprises will adopt more and more of those tools with limited but integrated functionality. Those collaborative projects will bring a lot of change in organizations, some directly anticipated; other will be building from a bottom-up approach.  Traditional ECM platforms will concentrate on developing Content Vertical applications because: even more enterprises are aware of valuable potential to optimize content processes with good ROI, and because Microsoft Sharepoint is now able to cover global horizontal content needs, for collaborative purpose.

• IT Department:

IT Departments will accelerate transformation to a new business model based on services. Cloud aspects and Saas solutions will develop offers and give real opportunities for some IT departments to cover even more than just infrastructure but to transform into some kind of Enterprise Information and Organization department. In any case, ITSM will transform into an ITOM as Offer management, this will extend already methods and catalogs into a more end user valuable package of services. IT departments will start to include some marketing function to develop those offers.

• Access to information:

Enterprise search will continue its transformation into a major part of Information System (other are Content and Data platform), bringing new opportunities and value to businesses and surely a strong link with Business Intelligence.

Portals will transform to become one real full single point of use and functional integration for both data and content using gadgets, widgets, and all user centric functionalities. Portals will be even more one of the most tactical parts of any transformation based on Information Management. Because they are one of the major components of change.

Convergence in Mobile world is still very up to date; today mobile helps end users to access many different kinds of information, integration with organization will be developing, bringing search capability, social networking, and access to part of core applications.

Content infrastructure will transform to have a centralized management and virtual central repository, but the “one will do all” will only be possible if “all” is on a very limited scope. It means, ECM platform could be composed by many different applications in many different places, offline functionality. This will bring major change in vendors specialization (Cf vertical and Horizontal).