Friday, June 02, 2006

Vista in 2007 v. improved New Account Opening now

How much has the news that Microsoft intends to include records management and workflow in the next release of Windows (Vista) shaken companies’ plans to implement new account opening systems?

As Microsoft released several press releases of their plans to include key enterprise capabilities with the new operating system, many Enterprise Content Management (ECM) analysts commented on how this may have some CIOs rattled (see Dan Elam’s comments in an AIIM interview), and how.

And most CIOs won’t be paying all this attention because they believe that the Microsoft capabilities will be particularly good, or solve their business issues, especially not in the first release. But they will question whether the low price-point will allow them to use a bunch of services to make the product work in their environment (see my views on the way IBM works customers like this in a comment on the MS FinServ blog).

Alternatively, the CIOs believe that the downward price pressure will reduce the cost of real enterprise RM and workflow players. Until MS really releases something that represents a real business solution, rather than a toolkit, this won’t happen.

So it is down to the CIO to get some smart feedback from the operational and legal departments on what the business case is for doing something now against waiting another year. I think that the massive regulatory fines and legal actions that some companies are experiencing right now will convince them to do something sooner, rather than later.

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