The maturity of enterprise content management (ECM), business intelligence (BI), workflow or collaboration-enabling products in SA depends on the level of regulatory pressure in any given market vertical, says Cyril Belikoff, information worker executive at Microsoft SA.
"The enterprise content management tender is an example of the public sector's drive for governance compliance. With government putting more pressure on the private sector to be compliant, the demand for these types of solutions is growing."
Belikoff says in SA, ECM and BI products are still in early adoption, and primarily focused on structured data. "This will change when regulation for broader communications such as instant messaging and VOIP becomes more prominent."
Belikoff has seen dramatic growth in Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server offering, which he says indicates an increase in general market adoption. "Business growth for the product is between 30% and 40%." The demand has been higher than the company's ability to deliver, he adds.
"SharePoint is essentially the back-end of the Office suite and combines ECM, BI, workflow and collaboration, and many other capabilities into one product."
Belikoff says SharePoint's growth is actually a compound figure, since it represents all the company's possible inroads in the market.
Working together
One of the global trends described in a white paper created by Microsoft, titled New World of Work, is "transparent organisations". Belikoff says this tendency is forcing people to run businesses differently. "People need software to ensure all compliance standards and regulations are met."
Roy Blume, research manager at BMI-TechKnowledge, says regulation is definitely one of the drivers in renewed growth spurt for knowledge management products. "But, for the most part, organisations are only looking to find easier ways to access the information they already have."
Blume says as companies become more people-centric, the more they will require products that provide integrated knowledge management. "SharePoint is everything and a bit, and with the resurgence of portal-based environments, high growth figures are definitely believable."
"People are also starting to appreciate the value of collaboration," says Belikoff. He believes these environments will mean the difference between whether a company will be competitive or not.
"The world has a new breed of very technologically literate people. If an organisation does not provide an environment these workers can relate to, they will not be able to compete in a global environment. And collaboration is a very big part of that and a part of knowledge management."
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