The era of enterprise content management (ECM) may end by 2020 with several changes happening in mobile, analytics, cloud and collaborative technologies.

In an AIIM survey of 434 organisations, 60% said gaining user adoption has been a severe problem for their ECM project.

Knowledge workers in 62% of organisations still depend on file shares for daily data access, according to the ECM Decisions Industry Watch report.

ECM/DM is seen as mission-critical for over two-thirds of organisations, with one-third of respondents stating that they would have severe disruption after an outage of just one hour.

ECM/RM is a fundamental part of the information security regime in 75% of organisations. 52% of enterprises have three or more ECM/DM/RM systems while the number is five or more for 22%.

Organisations have not yet linked their traditional ECM systems to mobile capabilities. 39% have some degree of mobile access for content in ECM repositories.

Just 5% have widespread access for staff and project partners and less than 20% have comment, edit and process interaction capability that is app-based, the report added.

AIIM president John Mancini said: "The ECM industry is in need of a new label and organisations are desperate for best practices to deal with the technology disruption that is occurring."

"Even among the current users of ECM technologies, 52% believe that within five years, ECM systems will be an undifferentiated part of the IT infrastructure."

The second report, Content Management 2020: Thinking Beyond ECM Trendscape, included the identification of the future role of ECM through a series of hypotheses/trends on the future of content and information management.

Participants included 56 senior executives from Europe and North America from companies including Microsoft, IBM, Adobe and Box.

The AIIM report said that by 2020 new approaches will be followed for privacy and security, more virtual and distributed work will be undertaken and there will be a shortage of connective and analytic skills in IT staffs.

According to the report, there will be ubiquitous broadband connectivity and increased regulation of the cloud by national governments.

Mancini said: "Organisations have always wrestled with how to manage the intersection of people, processes, and information, and over the past fifteen years we have called this set of technologies Enterprise Content Management, or ECM.

"But that time is almost over and we are entering a new era of ‘ECM’, that will more accurately reflect the changing landscape."