A survey of organizations using enterprise content management has found that content search, sharing and compliance will drive much of the spending on ECM next year.

Web content management and records management will also be areas of investment in 2010 by the 170 information and knowledge management professionals interviewed in October by Forrester Research. Respondents ofthe surveyhad decision-making roles in ECM.

While organizations would like to have one ECM suite to meet all their needs, they continue to have multiple point products and/or suites in place. Software as a service and open sourceECM alternatives are on enterprises’ radar, but the deployments are more for persuasive content initiatives than for business or transactional, Forrester found.

A continuous problem with ECM remains return on investment, which will make getting approval for ECM spending more difficult. But investment in ECM continues to have “great value in terms of information worker productivity, as the amount of content enterprises produce continues to increase,” Forrester said in its ECM report written by analyst Stephen Powers.

Continues @http://intelligent-enterprise.informationweek.com/