Article on Long Beach Conference

[With permission from the author, we are reprinting an account of the ARMA International Conference held in Long Beach, California, in early October of this year. For a link to the actual article (which contains direct links to many of the companies mentioned in the article), click on "Article on Long Beach Conference," above.]

KMWorld, Content Document and Knowledge Management
Volume 13, Number 10
November/December 2004

ARMA breaks records

by Robert Smallwood of IMERGE Consulting, Inc.

ARMA International's annual conference and expo Oct. 3 to 6 in Long Beach, Calif., broke previous records, according to its organizers, becoming the largest ever records and document management trade show. Fueled by a heightened interest in boardrooms, legal and IT departments stemming from regulatory changes such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, 230-plus exhibits (and more than 90 companies new to the event) filled the show floor.

“We’ve never seen such a strong turnout from IT and legal professionals," says Dave McDermott, president of ARMA (Association for Records Managers and Administrators).

“The show exceeded our expectations,” says ARMA board member John Phillips, president of Information Technology Decisions (http://infotechdecisions.com). “It’s the result of our focus on organizational mission and member needs. Strategically, we’ve kept our attention on the U.S. and Canada, while carefully growing our global presence.”

A few key trends continued as software and services firms seek to offer full document life cycle management. Paper file and box tracking vendors added new radio frequency identification (RFID) capabilities that allow remote tracking of physical files within an organization, and also expanded their offerings to include electronic records management capabilities. Records and information management (RIM) vendors continued the trend of adding traditional electronic document management (EDM) capabilities.

Major EDM software suppliers have scrambled to acquire or align themselves with RIM vendors to integrate crucial records management capabilities and to become compliant with U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) 5015.2 standard for records management systems.
E-mail management continued to be a hot topic as corporations and executives have been exposed to serious penalties due to e-mail content--often the “smoking gun” not contained in most formal records. E-mail management topics were some of the best-attended sessions at this year's ARMA conference.

Adam Wilkins, VP of Canadian-based e-mail management provider Yaletown Technology Group, a FileNet partner, pointed out that “ARMA's conference seemed to carry a more compelling message than ever before. Compliance and litigation will continue to accelerate business needs over the coming years. In the interim, e-mail and other high-volume sources of documents will force companies to change the way they allow users to create and manage electronic documents, both records and non-records.”

Strides have also been made in searching and locating records. "A new breed of search engines that provide an open, Web services architecture are emerging that can perform full-text and keyword searches across multiple content sources. This is a powerful way to integrate across these content silos," says Eric Perry, VP of product management at Scientific Software.

What the industry will likely see is the unrelenting consolidation of solution providers until they have the ability to track all written communications including e-mail, records and documents--whether paper or electronic--from creation to distribution to archiving and ultimately, to a shelf in a records storage warehouse, all of which bodes well for ARMA International’s future.

Robert Smallwood is a partner with IMERGE Consulting (imergeconsult.com), e-mail robert.smallwood@imergeconsult.com.

KMWorld, Content Document and Knowledge Management Volume 13, Number 10 November/December 2004
KMWorld is a publishing unit of Information Today, Inc.