AIIM, the leading non-profit association which acts as the ECM industry's intermediary, today released a new report by Doug Miles on Using SharePoint for ECM.  We'll be highlighting additional findings from the study during the week, but a sampling of the study's key findings includes:

• IT is by far the most advanced department for adoption and use, followed by Line-of-Business – likely reflecting the widespread use for project management.
• A quarter of respondents consider their stored content in SharePoint to be doubling every 2 years or less, and 5% have over 10TB of data already.
• Project management and internal IT support are the two most popular business processes to be automated with SharePoint, followed by proposals and contracts, and customer service. Inbound forms processing, case management and web forms are the processes set to grow most.
• 18% are currently using a workflow or BPM third-party add-on, but this is set to grow to 55% in total. 40% plan to have add-ons for security, classification, records management and archive, and 30% are seeking to improve backup, external storage and email integration.

• 53% consider SharePoint to be their primary ECM system going forward, but 22% will use it in conjunction with their existing systems. For 27%, their existing systems, or a new non-SharePoint system, will remain the key content management mechanism. 18% have yet to set a strategy.

• A third of organizations will pull as much information into SharePoint as possible to provide a universal information portal, whereas 37% plan to use SharePoint as a master-portal linking to other repositories. 19% plan to link to SharePoint from an existing dedicated portal or ECM system.
• 46% reported their biggest on-going issue to be the lack of strategic plans on what to use SharePoint for, and what not to use it for. Next are governance issues, and the lack of expertise to maximize its usefulness.

Survey respondents included 674 members of the AIIM community in roles representing IT, records management, information management, compliance, and line-of-business managers.  Furthermore, respondents represented organizations of all sizes, with 34% being from large organizations, 38% from mid-sized organizations, and 27% representing small-to-mid-sized organizations.

In the interests of full disclosure, it should be noted that the study was underwritten, in part, by Bamboo Solutions, though survey author Doug Miles states that in no uncertain terms that "The results of the survey and the market commentary made in [the] report are independent of and bias from the vendor community."  The author goes on to describe the process undertaken with the survey, and provides a two-page appendix exhaustively detailing survey demographics. 

To download your free copy of the industry report, visit: http://www.aiim.org/Research/Industry-Watch/SharePoint-2011.

Our look at the findings in the AIIM report continues with:

• SharePoint Adoption & Scale Findings in the 'Using SharePoint for ECM' AIIM Report
• SharePoint Deployment Findings in the 'Using SharePoint for ECM' AIIM Report
• Findings Related to SharePoint 2010 Experiences in the 'Using SharePoint for ECM' AIIM Report
• Business Process and Third-party Integration Findings in the 'Using SharePoint for ECM' AIIM Report
• Forward Strategies Findings in the 'Using SharePoint for ECM' AIIM Report

• Governance Findings in the 'Using SharePoint for ECM' AIIM Report