To give a practical example, a healthcare professional will need awareness of all the documents related to a particular patient. These documents and records are sorted and managed through their lifecycle as a "Case" even though they may reside in different locations, have different owners, other relationships, and different retention policies.  Other individuals may also need to interact with these documents for the purposes of billing or insurance. Same documents, different purpose. There may also be multiple legal and compliancy requirements to attend to.

In theory at least, Case Management provides you with the tools to pre-define and orchestrate those requirements. Permissions, rules, metadata, and processes all play a part in what can be a highly complex system. 

For some organizations, Case Management applications built from ECM platforms form the core of their business, and more will in the future. The need to better manage the massive volumes of transactional documentation is growing more acute, and Case Management will certainly play an increasingly important role. 

Yet almost more than any other scenario, Case Management demands good information governance and squeaky clean relevant data. Without it everything falls apart. The fact that so many organizations are lacking here is another key reason Case Management is not as widely deployed as it could be. 

Selecting the right software to meet your Case Management needs is difficult, since everyone claims to do it,  but very few do it well.  The nightmare scenario for a buyer of a Case Management system is to buy a vanilla ECM software system and then just bring in a .NET or Java developer. You are not only buying technical functionality you should also be buying deep and very specific domain expertise, and without the right combination of the two you can be in trouble quick.

ECM vendors such as Hyland, Objective, Open Text, EMC, Autonomy and IBM all have deep expertise and knowledge in the particular industry sectors that they design systems for (Pharma, Legal, Government, Intelligence, Healthcare, Insurance,  Law Enforcement, Retail etc). They know (mostly) what works and what does not, and they understand industry specific business processes right down to the task level. You are paying as much for that knowledge, as you are for their software.

Assuming though that you do have your document house in order, and already utilize Case Management, there are some interesting developments on the near horizon -- most notably the use of business intelligence and analytics tools to extract further value from what is already a rich information set.  Consider the possibilities of early fraud and discrepancy detection or new and emerging trend analysis from the very rich data within your documents.  BI has long been locked solely into the 20% of data that is structured in the enterprise, and is a valued tool set. But very large and clean volumes of documentation that have been given a tight structure can be mined these days too, and those documents theoretically at least, represent the other 80% of the data we deal with in business.  In fact some organizations are already starting to use tools like Cognos, Hyperion, and Business Objects in Case Management deployments, and they are liking what they see.

And remember it's our job here to ensure that technology buyers make the right decisions via the use of our research, and one of the best ways for us to do that is to continuously talk with buyers and users who are at the coalface.  So if you are an organization that is using Case Management along with some kind of BI tool, then  I would love to chat with you in confidence to hear more about what works and what does not just drop me a note and we can chat.

Ironically, it's early days for a combination of technologies that have been with us separately for many years. Yet this could prove to be a very good long term marriage.

People outside of highly regulated environments typically assume that records and retention management in sectors like healthcare, financial services, and energy is state of the art.  This is far from the case.

Most often Records Management is underfunded,  inadequately resourced, and unloved.  It is no cliche to say it is also often run from underground, literally in basements out of sight of those who need to do "real work." 

In places where records are actively managed, they are usually managed well, with detailed and well-maintained file plans and retention schedules.  But many organizations only manage a fraction of the records they should be.  For example very few records management departments include e-mail as part of their remit, yet e-mail is where all the "stuff" happens. 

But maybe, just maybe, the tide is starting to turn.

Here at the Real Story Group we currently support a number of large advisory customers who are looking at records management strategically across highly complex working environments.  We have others who are looking at the whole issue of information management and ECM more strategically than in the past, and have begun to include RM as a component or a recognized future element of their work. 

That might not sound like much, but just a year or so ago it seemed like nobody cared.  Things like e-government initiatives, healthcare reform, demand or need for more self-service applications, increased regulations, and so forth seldom have the immediate impact people expect. And in a world where decisions can get driven by today's opinion polls, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that many of the biggest and most profound changes we encounter in our society occur at a far slower pace.

The most overused phrase in my personal lexicon is, "time will tell." But I fervently hope that time will tell us that awareness of the importance of RM and archiving has slowly risen to the fore.

To quote:

Workflow services can help minimize the cost and time required to coordinate common approval processes -- but only if the service does what you want it to do, and users don't "work around" the system....

Subscribers to our WCM and DAM research streams can download the workflow paper here.

Within that service we cover XML authoring tools: the software for creating and editing highly complex documentation, be it DITA structured technical documentation, complex translation work, or product information designed for multiple re-use. But our research goes beyond the editing and authoring options at the front end, and evaluates all the leading CCM (Component Content Management) tools that have been designed to manage the publishing and workflow of these complex XML document components throughout their lifecycle.

On other occasions we separate technologies into different categories, where others may have bundled them together. An obvious case here is our Web Content Management research and our Enterprise Content Management Suites research. Just in the past fortnight I have been asked by more than one person why we have two subscription services for the same technology. Well the simple answer is that it is not the same technology: the technology to manage outward (web) facing content and sites, versus the technology to manage inward-facing (documents and files) content and filing systems is quite different. But nevertheless it is a very fair question to ask, because to someone outside the industry (and even some insiders) that distinction is not always obvious.

Confusion can come about due to vendor branding strategies or a plethora of nebulous acronyms used within the industry. For example Interwoven (recently acquired by Autonomy) did a good job of branding their WorkSite (document & files) offering quite separately from their TeamSite (web content) offering. Other vendors such as EMC Documentum or Open Text use a single brand moniker (such as "digital media") to cover all their content-focused software offerings regardless of each component's specific purpose, while in other instances product names can even be synoymous with the firm's brand, as with ADAM and Sitecore.

Then there is the issue of acronyms. We use the term ECM as it is the most commonly used term for document-based technologies, however in different regions and industry segments ECM is referred to as EDMS, EDM, EDRM, Document Control, IM, IDM even KM. As an advisory firm we have to call our research and services something, and we are faced with picking and choosing amongst a myriad of terms, typically choosing the most well-known term currently in use.

Our job at CMS Watch is to make sense of the complexity of the technology offerings out there for you, the buyer - and that can be a challenge at the best of times. We believe it's safe to say that we have more research available to our subscribers on content technologies than all of our competitors combined. But volume, depth and breadth is not all that separates us from our competitors, we are in addition avowedly a firm that follows the market rather than "makes" it. Thus, we don't try and come up with new acronyms, terminology or market segments, we don't cheerlead for the industry or get involved in market sizing, we stick to the basics of evaluating current release products side by side and evaluating the importance of current trends.

So here is my challenge to you. We evaluate over 200 products and sub-divide those into 10 subscription services, which in turn are sub-divided into about 5-8 sub-categories each. We try to use common terminology so that you the buyer can relate to and locate the research that meets your needs, but that does not always work as well as it could. So if you find the product evaluation(s) you need, but locate them in a place - or grouped in a way you find 'surprising' or 'interesting', let us know. Tell us how you and your colleagues perceive these technologies, what you call them, how you would categorize them differently, how you explain them to your internal clients or project teams. Truly we would love to hear from you as this industry remains a dynamic and very moveable feast at times....

EMC has made a developer edition of Content Server freely available, and they have also provided a similar free developer environment for xDB. At the same time, each free developer edition will have an accompanying online community that provides code samples, tutorials and full documentation.

All in all, this represents quite a significant turnaround for EMC Documentum and one that is to be applauded. I can speak from personal past experience of the nightmare of finding basic technical advice regarding Documentum releases, and being reduced to scouring the web for potential (and often unreliable) information. This announcement will also provide a sigh of relief for those who have had to pay license fees for Documentum development environments. More importantly it shows EMC 'opening the kimono' (as that awful phrase goes) more widely than we might have expected.

We often comment that Microsoft has also gone from being a secretive firm (even about current releases) to (in the case of SharePoint) a very positive level of openness, community support and involvement. As always it will be time that decides the success of the EMC initiative, but I suspect it will be just as successful as Microsoft's community initiative around SharePoint, as there is an established, vibrant and very sizeable Documentum community out there who have long awaited this day.

In fact Microsoft comes to this party via two key partners: NextDocs (and their consulting partners at CSC) and First Consulting Group - both delivering applications for regulatory submissions built on SharePoint. It is of particular note that FCG was (and remains) a long term EMC|Documentum partner and brings a vast amount of industry expertise to the equation. So we are not looking at a couple of fresh-faced upstarts, but rather experienced veterans entering the market with a new, low-cost alternative.

In some regards this should not come as all that much of a surprise, particularly to those of us who consulted to the Life Sciences sector. Many enterprises in this sector are dedicated Documentum or Open Text customers, but few of them truly use the functionality to its full effect, and many have spent huge sums of money on licenses that remain unused. The sector has offered a longtime cash cow for ECM vendors, and I've seen first hand the low priority assigned by vendors in return (such customers were considered "locked in," and managed via a few key contacts and the use of corporate hospitality)...a situation ripe for change.

For buyers in this sector, it gives a great opportunity to reassess your ECM investments. Examine what you really use, what you want, and what you have, then look at the marketplace afresh to see what measures up. If nothing else the more credible Microsoft entrance into the market gives you considerable leverage over existing relationships -- an opportunity you should use to your advantage.