Ron Ercanbrack, VP at IBM (my old boss from my brief tenure at FileNet in 2000-1, who once introduced me at a FileNet sales kickoff conference as the “Queen of BPM”), gave a brief ECM-focused keynote this morning. He covered quite a bit of the information that I was briefed on last week, including Case Manager, Content Analytics, improved content integration including CMIS, the Datacap and PSS acquisitions, enhancements to Content Collector, and more. He positioned Case Manager as a product “running on top of BPM”, which is a bit different than the ECM-centric message that I’ve heard so far, but likely also accurate: there are definitely significant components of each in there.
He was followed by Carl Kessler, VP of Development, to give a Case Manager demo; this covered the end-user case management environment (pretty much what we’ve seen in previous sessions, only live), plus Content Analytics for text mining which is not really integrated with Case Manager: it’s a separate app with a different look and feel. I missed the launch point, so I don’t know whether he launched this from a property value in Case Manager or had to start from scratch using the terms relevant to that case. It has some very nice text mining capabilities for searching through the content repository for correlation of terms, including some pretty graphs, but it’s a separate app.
We then went off to the Cognos Real-time Monitoring Dashboard, which is yet again another non-integrated app with a different look and feel. He showed a dashboard that had a graph for average age of cases and allowed drill-down on different parameters such as industry type and dispute type, but that’s not really the same as a fully integrated product suite. Although all of the components applications are functional, this needs a lot more integration at the end-user level.
I did get a closer look at some of the Case Builder functionality than I’ve seen already: in the tasks definition section, there are required tasks, optional tasks and user-created tasks, although it’s not clear what user-created tasks are since this is design-time, not runtime.
Ercanbrack came back to the stage for a brief panel with three customers – Bank of America, State of North Dakota, and BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee – talking about their ECM journeys. This was not specific to case management at all, but using records/retention management to reduce storage costs and risks in financial services, using e-discovery as part of a legal action in healthcare, and content management with a case management approach for allowing multiple state government agencies to share documents more effectively.