U.S. Treasury will spend $28M on ECM in FY2009

According to the latest Report on Information Technology Spending for the Federal Government, the U.S. Treasury Department is requesting $28.2 million to spend on Enterprise Content Management systems in Fiscal Year 2009, up from $16.9M in FY2008 and $16.3M in FY2007. This is for the Treasury Department itself, not for the U.S. Government's other agencies. The total IT-related budget request covering all parts of the U.S. Government is $70.9 billion for 2009, up from $68.3 billion the year before.

The budget spreadsheet does not mention vendors by name but does note that ECM monies will be spent on COTS (commercial off-the-shelf software). That's fed-speak for "no bloated consultingware" (obviously a good thing), but also "no open source."

As ECM Suites Report readers know, "ECM" can encompass a variety of different technologies. Many federal agencies are today hard at work to install large-scale imaging systems, with large-scale price-tags, but also very large potential returns. With a seemingly fragile global financial marketplace, it's understandable that the Treasury Department is looking to get a better handle on the volumes of information it processes each day.

Excerpt from the Fedora Evaluation

Brand & Digital Asset Management Evaluation Stream looks at... Fedora's lack of enterprise DAM capabilities

"Fedora's file agnosticism, along with its ability to scale to tens of millions of objects, its indifference to locality of objects (it will store objects centrally, and/or let content "live where it lives"), its liberal open-source licensing, and its ability to support semantic query technology (file relationships are stored as RDF), has made Fedora a favorite for institutions with large, complex collections of digital works that need to be exposed (in a controlled way) to a large, heterogeneous user base. However, unlike what you'll find from vendors in the "Enterprise" category of this report, don't come expecting a feature-rich front end, or a system that natively understands Adobe XMP, or a system that can do file-transformation tricks out of the box...."
(p. 286)

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