Pelz-Sharpe Alan Pelz-Sharpe

ECM skills shortage

6-Mar-2007

Tags: Document Management (ECM), Building Business Case, Industry Standards

This past week I had the privilege of attending and speaking at the AIIM Executive Summit in Albuquerque. These invitation-only events allow users, educators, vendors, and analysts to congregate in a confidential and non-competitive environment to mull over the future of the industry. I certainly came away with some thoughts to mull over -- in particular the lack of ECM skills and awareness in the general marketplace. Finding a skilled and affordable Documentum consultant or ECM architect can be hell, and your chances of locating a good ECM-aware business consultant can be near impossible. As the reach and impact of ECM grows, and so too do the rotten projects: those that promise the world and fall staggeringly short of their intended aims. While the technology is imperfect, it is almost always poor human skills, and ignorance of ECM fundamentals, that doom these projects.

For sure there is a need for more industry-specific education, and for closer involvement and support for college-level training. But there is also a need for vendors to be less proprietary about their products, encouraging both buyers and third party consultants alike to want to embrace and learn the ins and outs. We also need the big consultancies to articulate to C-level management how technology can assist change, and the importance of unstructured data and process management, in terms that they can not only understand, but actually want to embrace. There is bottled up demand for ECM technologies, stymied and frustrated by the lack of appropriate skills and education to enable the tools to effect the profound and important changes necessary within many organizations.

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