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In this article I'd like to outline three trends for the year ahead which I believe illustrate the potential for up-and-coming ECM and DM technologies to remodel how work gets done and how businesses grow.

The three top trends we see as shaping the Document and Enterprise Content Management market are cloud, the move from 'searchability' to 'findability' and the acceptance of ECM's role as a much more central part of the business landscape. So let's go through these one at a time to explain why.

1. Cloud gets real
2015 will be all about cloud becoming truly mainstream, for the reasons I probably don't have to trot out again: lower cost of ownership, immediacy, document control, disaster recovery, ability to work from anywhere - all that good stuff. Yes, there are genuine (and important) questions still to answer over security, where best to physically locate data and so forth, but that's not a problem unique to the cloud. Think, for example, how many laptops are lost at airports alone. When everything is stored in the cloud, data can still be accessed no matter what happens to the physical hardware. Cloud is here now - so deal with it!

The go-to action for DM practitioners: You'll have to start meeting user demand for access to content from wherever they want and from whatever device. As long as employees have access to the Internet, they can work from anywhere. This flexibility has a real impact on knowledge workers' productivity and work-life balance. Be aware that no one expects us to really ever go to a cloud-only world, though. Just because cloud-based technologies are the future doesn't mean that "legacy systems" are history completely yet of course. You will always need to be able to blend both legacy and cloud services, so start learning how to do that now.

2. Information seeks us out
Findability will become very important indeed over the next year. 'Findability' and 'Searchability' are not interchangeable terms, although they are often treated as such. 'Findability' describes the ease with which information on a website can be found, both from the outside, using search engines, and from the inside, by searching the website itself, whereas 'Searchability' is the ability to retrieve information by using known information, so a keyword or specific phrase. Being able to find the information you need, when you need it, can make or break your business. If you find what you need, before you even realise that you need it, then that makes things very interesting indeed.

In an ideal world, search technology would take account of who you are, what you do, where you are and what you know, so that you get the information that's relevant to you and you alone and that is the world we are moving into. Is there life beyond Google? Yes; and Google knows this more than anyone else. That's why it's constantly innovating with technology and moving things forward, e.g. its fascinating work with predictive search (Google Instant). What all these years of search engines has shown us is that there's a lot of information out there, which we have to do the work to find. Better: let's push that great information the user's way, so that they are always empowered with knowledge and data. Think of it as making it easier to 'find' what they need - hence the idea of 'findability.' We are living in an age of unlimited findability - put simply, anyone can find anything at any time. This is really going to take off, by the way, when Big Data goes mainstream, another 2015 phenomenon to watch out for.

The go-to action for DM practitioners: Look to build great DM-enabled tools to make content as accessible as possible for this coming class of findability tools. Make great organisational knowledge and information assets easy to access and hook on to this trend. It'll be worth it, as the business will love you for making their lives that much easier!

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