Craig Le Clair from Forrester gave a keynote to discuss the role of capture and dynamic case management. He co-authored the Forrester Wave for Dynamic Case Manager published in January 2011, in which Singularity (acquired by Kofax last year) places in the leaders section. If I had wifi right now, I’d look up and link to his Forrester profile, but I recall that he also does a lot of CRM and enterprise software of various sorts.
I have little respect for middle-aged people (many younger than me) who just don’t make the effort to get plugged into this century, and tell cute anecdotes about “digital natives” – usually children under 10 who do something clever with an iPad – as an introduction to talking about social media and mobile applications in business environments. After that initial misstep, however, Le Clair laid out how the shift of consumer power to mobile devices will drive functions such as mobile capture, which Kofax provides by allowing the Atalasoft portal and mobile devices to become the point of origin for captured content.
He continued on to talk about managing untamed business processes, the topic of presentations that I’ve seen him do on webinars, and how case management can help knowledge workers deal with unstructured processes within an information-rich context. This was a bit of an introduction to case management, which it probably appropriate for most of the audience who come from the Kofax customer/partner side, including the three main use cases that Forrester is predicting for case management: investigations, service requests, and incidents.
He then went completely off on a tangent to talk about SharePoint and content frameworks, recommending that targeting SharePoint in your organization requires a view of its strengths and weaknesses. Duh, yeah. This appeared to be some sort of weak lead-in to a division between SharePoint targets and capture-driven process targets, but didn’t really make sense, or possibly there just wasn’t sufficient time to develop the idea. Not sure why the discussion of content ecosystems was even in this presentation.
He finished with a comparison between “Process 2011” (meaning today, so the slide should be updated to “Process 2012”) and “Process 2020”: in today’s world, processes are dictated by the business, not the customers, and mobile is just a pretty face on a traditional process that keeps peeking out at the most inopportune moments. There is a shift happening that puts customers in control in business processes, and enterprise software needs to adapt to accommodate that.