According to the AIIM Blog, the latest AIIM State Of The Industry Survey is available... One of the questions was what were the top 3 obstacles encountered during your Enterprise Content Management (ECM) implementation? The results are below:

• 44%=Underestimated process and organizational issues
• 32%=Lack of knowledge or training among our internal staff
• 30%=Project derailed by internal politics
• 29%=Uneven usage due to poor procedures and lack of enforcement
• 21%=Underestimated the effort to distill and migrate content
• 20%=Excessive "scope creep"
• 19%=Failed to address taxonomy and metadata concerns
• 18%=Low user acceptance due to poor design or clumsy implementation
• 16%=Failed to think or benefits/issues beyond our business unit.
• 16%=Poorly defined business case
• 13%=Lack of knowledge or training among our external staff/suppliers
• 13%=Budget was overrun
• 12%=Failed to prioritize "high-value" content

What I found interesting, was that very few of these issues can be tied to failures in the technology... its seems to be a failure of the organization. Lack of training/resources/knowledge could possibly point to an overly complex product... "scope creep" could be due to inflexible technology, or inflexible project managers... but bad taxonomy was blamed more often than the "clumsy implementation."

This kind of reinforces what I always believed about ECM... its not really about the technology, its not even about the content; its about people. I always hated those snake oil salesmen selling coblaberation instead of collaboration. A hunk of technology isn't going to make all your process problems go away. If you have good processes, technology will make your life simpler. If you have bad processes, technology will amplify your problems.