As hard as we may try to avoid this, when you work in an industry - and especially if you are in marketing - it is easy to start thinking that everybody in your universe talks in the same langauge that you do. As industries evolve, vendors, the media and analysts, industry organizations and other influencers develop terms and dreaded acronyms to talk about products and problems, and they quickly get adopted by each other. Eventually you find yourself talking to your customers about your "SaaS CRM solution for SMBs with a sales force automation problem". When what they really want to hear is that your product can help their sales people track leads better without having to invest heavily in supporting more IT systems.
In our industry, the hot term is ECM, or Enterprise Content Management. I hear it and use it all the time. So much, in fact, that I stopped questioning whether the universe knew what ECM was. Then, this week, AIIM President John Mancini wrote this blog post about a survey AIIM conducted with executive, line of business and IT individuals who are not affiliated with AIIM (which by the way, is an industry association focused on ECM). The survey results showed that only 24% of the respondents had even heard the term ECM. On the plus side, of the 160 people who had heard the terms, nearly 3/4 of them understood what it was.
The AIIM definition of ECM is "the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes." That's accurate and all encompassing, but it is certainly a handful. And, based on the survey, it is not what companies are thinking about.
So here's my pledge to you. In this blog, we will strive to talk about the actual problems that customers are facing and the ways that they are solving those problems. We'll talk about the problems that result from paper-based processes and how to solve them. We'll talk about sharing information between workers. We'll talk about making workers more productive. We'll even get into some deeper technology discussions about scanning, MFPs, PDFs and other image types. And hopefully you'll begin to understand how these problems and solutions fit into a bigger strategy...maybe even start thinking about ECM. But that's not where we are going to start.
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