Latin America Begins Looking Towards ECM
No matter what hemisphere you’re in, one of the main driving forces behind business is competition.
When the competition gets neck-and-neck, businesses look for whatever advantage they can find; and that’s exactly what’s happening in Latin America as a result of the strong and steady GDP growth. More and more companies want – and need – that competitive edge, and they’re finding it in ECM (Enterprise Content Management).
Surprisingly, a large amount of Latin American companies are still harboring outdated idea of what exactly ECM is. For them, it is the same as the EDM (Electronic Document Management) systems of the early 80s – nothing more than a digital filing cabinet.
Out With the Old
Some of these businesses still even do their internal management on paper. But many of these companies are abandoning these old-fashioned ideas when they see their competition take the lead by implementing a state-of-the-art ECM system.
Not surprisingly, the leaders of this revolution are the countries with major and more mature markets. Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Colombia – the usual suspects – are experiencing the most rapid integration of ECM, in some cases in the same field (or even surpassing) the economic powerhouses of other continents.
On its own, Brazil spent over $68 million on ECM solutions in 2013. By 2018, that amount is expected to nearly triple (estimates suggest $165 million).
It all started with big data analytics, which shone a light on the need to integrate all the information within their companies. In this difficult transition period, we see a trend of companies implementing ECM in some departments but not others, failing to achieve that total, company-wide integration for which ECM works best. But even this partial integration is being abandoned for the convenience of full-scale ECM.
Coming of Age
As a result, the companies that successfully use ECM have less paperwork, less redundancies, and more collaborative environments than to easier methods of file-sharing. We see them enjoying the benefits of organization and using their time more efficiently.
In general, Latin America is going through a phase of developing their digitization and IT infrastructure.
Cloud computing is on the rise, as are implementations of CMS. The popularization of big data analytics, which spurred the movement towards ECM, is further evidence of Latin America’s “coming of age”.
These growing global economies are now adopting the techniques and tools that will allow them to compete with the rest of the world – which will no doubt be good for business!