Charting the Gaps: An Electronic Document Management Strategy for the State of Michigan.
Department of Technology, Management, and Budget, State of Michigan · Government
Benchmarking Top Commercial EDM Products to Guide the State’s Document and Records Management Strategy
Executive summary
As the State of Michigan continued its transition from paper to electronic records, it found itself running a patchwork of commercial and custom-developed electronic document management (EDM) systems across its departments and agencies. That fragmentation brought mounting costs, a lack of standardization, and growing operational complexity, and the state needed an objective, evidence-based way to understand where its current systems stood against the broader commercial market before making its next move.
Michigan’s Department of Technology, Management, and Budget (DTMB) engaged Iknow as prime contractor to compile a feature and functionality benchmark of the “top 10” commercial EDM products and identify the gaps between those products and the three EDM systems most widely used within the state. Iknow grounded the entire evaluation in direct interviews with Michigan staff, drew on independent market research and vendor data alongside its own proprietary product database, and delivered findings that DTMB used directly to guide vendor selection, negotiation, and internal strategy discussions across the state’s departments and agencies.
Background & context
About the Client
Michigan’s Department of Technology, Management, and Budget provides IT services and oversees records management policy for state government, including the retention and disposal schedules that every state agency’s electronic records — regardless of which system stores them — must comply with. That statewide, cross-agency responsibility made a decentralized landscape of overlapping EDM systems a direct and ongoing challenge for DTMB to manage.
Industry Context
Long-term digital preservation has remained a well-defined discipline since this engagement, anchored by the ISO 19005 PDF/A standard that the National Archives and Records Administration and numerous state archives continue to recommend for retaining electronic government records in a stable, non-proprietary format. What has changed is the layer of intelligence built on top of that foundation: by 2026, records management platforms increasingly incorporate AI-driven classification, automated metadata extraction, and automated retention-policy enforcement, turning archiving from a manual, back-office task into an active compliance and risk-control function. Iknow’s 2014 gap analysis addressed the same foundational question those AI-enabled systems now build on top of — whether an organization’s document platforms and file formats are structured well enough to remain usable, findable, and compliant over the long term.
Current Situation
Michigan’s departments and agencies had accumulated a variety of commercial and custom EDM systems over time, with no coordinated statewide standard guiding which capabilities those systems should provide. DTMB needed to understand precisely how the state’s three most widely used EDM systems compared to the leading commercial products on the market — across core document and records management, workflow, image management, mobile device integration, custom application integration, and long-term file format preservation — before it could chart a credible path forward.
Problem / challenge
- A fragmented EDM landscape. Many commercial and custom-developed systems were in use across Michigan’s departments and agencies, with no statewide standard guiding capability or vendor choice.
- Rising cost and complexity. Supporting multiple overlapping EDM systems was becoming more expensive and operationally complex as the state’s volume of electronic records grew.
- No objective basis for comparison. DTMB had no structured, vendor-neutral way to measure its existing systems against the broader commercial EDM marketplace.
- Diverse, statewide use cases. Any evaluation criteria had to reflect the real needs of many different departments and agencies, not a single generic checklist, and had to account for the state’s legal obligation to preserve records in formats suitable for long-term retention.
Project objectives
- Compile a feature and functionality benchmark of the “top 10” commercial EDM products most relevant to Michigan’s departments and agencies.
- Analyze the feature and functionality of the three EDM systems currently most widely used within the state.
- Identify and evaluate the importance of the functionality gaps between the state’s current systems and the top 10 commercial products.
- Analyze alternative file formats suitable for long-term document retention and recommend options.
Iknow’s approach
How Iknow Structured the Work
Iknow built the evaluation from the ground up around Michigan’s own requirements rather than starting from a generic vendor feature list, then triangulated multiple independent data sources to keep the resulting comparison objective and vendor-neutral.
Key Activities & Decisions
- Requirements Definition. Iknow interviewed Michigan staff to understand desired product functionality for their specific use cases, then used those findings to create the list of EDM features and functionality that served as the basis for every cross-platform comparison in the study.
- Comprehensive Product Analysis. Iknow conducted a full analysis of the 10 market-leading commercial EDM products alongside the three systems most widely used within the state — 13 products in total — evaluated against the same feature set.
- Multi-Source Data Collection. Iknow incorporated vendors’ product literature, independent product evaluations from market research firms such as Gartner, direct interviews with Michigan staff about their real-world experience with the products, and Iknow’s own proprietary product database.
- Long-Term File Format Analysis. Iknow used literature and expert sources to analyze alternative electronic file formats suitable for long-term document preservation and developed recommendations on the best options for the state.
Stakeholders & Collaboration
Iknow worked directly with DTMB’s IT and Records Management staff, as well as staff across Michigan’s departments and agencies who were interviewed to ensure the evaluation criteria reflected real operational use cases rather than a theoretical feature list.
Challenges & how Iknow overcame them
Keeping a Statewide Comparison Objective
Comparing the state’s own systems against 10 leading commercial products risked bias toward whichever data source was consulted, whether vendor marketing or a single analyst opinion. Iknow addressed this by triangulating four independent source types — vendor literature, independent market research, direct user interviews, and its own proprietary product database — so no single source could skew the findings.
Building Criteria That Reflected Real, Diverse Use Cases
A generic EDM feature checklist would not have reflected the genuinely different needs of Michigan’s many departments and agencies. Iknow addressed this by starting the entire engagement with interviews of Michigan staff, using their actual use cases to define the feature and functionality list before any product was evaluated against it.
Results & impact
Operational Outcomes
- Delivered an analysis of the features and functionality of the latest versions of the three primary EDM products currently in use within Michigan’s departments and agencies.
- Delivered a summary of features and functionality for the “top 10” commercial EDM products on the market.
- Delivered a description of the functionality gaps between the state’s existing products and the top 10 commercial products, with an evaluation of each gap’s importance.
- Delivered an analysis of alternative file formats suitable for long-term document retention.
Strategic and Organizational Outcomes
DTMB’s IT and Records Management staff used Iknow’s analysis directly to guide their selection process and negotiations with the state’s top EDM vendors, giving Michigan an evidence-based, vendor-neutral foundation for those discussions rather than relying solely on vendor claims. The study also helped frame internal conversations about EDM products across Michigan’s departments and agencies, giving a large, decentralized government IT environment a shared, common reference point for a decision that touched nearly every part of state government.
Timeline to Impact
Iknow completed the full product benchmark, gap analysis, and file format recommendations within the three-month engagement, delivering findings DTMB was able to put to immediate use in vendor selection and negotiation.
Iknow’s capabilities demonstrated
Core Skills
- IT Strategy Consulting
- Enterprise Content Management Advisory
- Vendor & Market Research Benchmarking
- Records Management Advisory
Methods & Frameworks
- Multi-source, vendor-neutral competitive gap analysis
- Feature and functionality benchmarking framework
- Long-term file format and preservation standard research
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