Case Management, Low on Hype, May Deliver the Promises of Its Ancestors

Provide workers the information they need to get their jobs done. It’s a great idea. Like most things, it’s been done before.

Provide workers the information they need to get their jobs done. That’s my one-line explanation for the knowledge-enabled processes of the 1990s.

What’s different now?

Software and solutions have been sold under the banners of knowledge management, content management, collaboration, workflow, business process management, and business process automation. All of those ancestors of case management have played their role, and in some cases, not lived up to the hype. Now the hype has been replaced by experience and the technologies have matured. The experience and maturity are being blended together into case management.

Unlike its ancestors, case management is low on hype. Unlike its ancestors, case management is not a stretch on the features of deployed solutions. The key benefit of case management is not new, unheard-of functionality. The key benefit of case management is to deliver easily-conceived functionality in a more productive user experience, with parameter-driven deployment, and with modest integration effort. Case management promises to remove technology barriers between content, data, process, and collaboration, to deliver the information the business wants, economically.

At first, EMC seems an unlikely candidate to deliver on this vision for case management. On further thought, case management may be the ultimate synergy of EMC’s eRoom, Documentum, Captiva, and Pro-activity heritage. eRoom achieved incredible heights of user appeal and deployability. Documentum has always been exceptionally integratable. Captiva brings world class ability to transform information on paper to electronic information, so that workers can get their jobs done. Proactivity offers the highest level of business process science. In its xCP product, EMC is showing strategic commitment to exactly this combination in the case management space. With this combination and commitment, xCP may be the product that exceeds industry hype.