Audio and Photos and Videos - OH MY

Those of you who trace your ECM roots back to the pre-internet days, like myself, have a unique appreciation for the impact that the internet has on on ECM.  My ECM career started in the mid-80s.  At that time the ECM-savvy community was very small.  Although we understood the powers of full-text retrieval and text management systems (2 of the terms we used to describe what today we call Findability), and online unstructured content, most business people did not.  My previous company, Delphi Group, made a significant amount of revenue simply educating business and technology professionals  on these concepts in the late 80s and early 90s.

Then along came the internet, the word wide web, and all that quickly changed.  Suddenly there was a universal issue: a universal body of content (ever growing) whose value was only leveraged if you could intuitively and quickly mine that content.  Search became the killer app of the web.

I mention this because, we old-timers learned a valuable lesson.  Experience has shown us that the internet will likely foreshadow or usher in trends within the firewall. We have seen this with Web 2.0 preceding the emergence of Enterprise 2.0.  History is about to repeat itself. 

Way back in the mid 80's, we ECMers were touting the availability and powers of multimedia content and multimedia search.  These pearls of wisdom fell on ears more deaf than those listening about text retrieval.

This is likely to change.  Recently Google announced face search, a tool for sorting and retrieving facial images (photos).  Today You-tube reports 13 hours of video loaded every minute, and has recently provided a video specific search engine, in context.  Both of these multimedia search tools are based on technology we ECMers talked about and demoed decades ago.  But the market was not ready.  All too many business professionals, with some minor exceptions in key verticals, had difficulty  understanding how and why video, photo, and audio recognition and retrieval would be valuable to their organization.

It is likely that recent developments on the internet will once again usher in a new era of enterprise awakening.  This is the focus of our upcoming Market IQ report - The On-ramps and Off-ramps of ECM. (You can register to receive the report now.)  My guess is that when we run our survey, we will find that most  organizations have a very small percentage of their enterprise content existing in the form of photographs, audio and video, and those that do will likely be using rudimentary tagging to search and retrieve those files. But what will be interesting to see the degree to which they are envisioning a near-term increase in usage of such content types.

Stay tuned ...