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–Zaheer

Great commentary on case management. To your point, a case is more about relationships than just managing the collection of docments associated with them.

One point I’d consider is that while in the extreme, case management problems “don’t lend themselves to fixed processes,” most of the problems that the average enterprise will try to solve with case management do have elements of structured processes. Take a look at something like mortgage origination. When you look at certain stages of this problem, especially the underwriting stage, there is indeed a lot of value to a more flexible, unstructured approach to managing the work. We need to give the underwriters guidelines (can’t approve without sufficient proof of income, etc.), but we don’t want to overly constrain them to the point where they aren’t able to use their best judgement and experience. With that in mind, there are certainly points where we can automate some of the non-value-add steps like generating documents, obtaining credit scores, or setting the applicant up in a back-end system. Here’s where we get value in leveraging the structured process capabilities we often see in BPMS.

This dovetails nicely with your statement about building blocks assembled in a new shape every time. The key is to pre-assemble the parts that make sense, but make sure to give the users the flexibility to deal with work as it happens.

I have a stab at a definition here:
http://kswenson.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/what-is-the-difference-between-case-management-and-bpm/

It’s been almost a decade passed since our Delta days. I value your strategy on content space since your predictions and educated guesses are nearly always right on the bull’s-eye. Although I don’t always concur with you, to my knowledge, your strategy and evaluation are much more interesting than others out there as far as content is concerned. That said, I cannot agree more about Private Cloud since it’s more of a strategy or a concept yet to be tested at this point. But, I believe, CC or PC is not only applicable to storage space, but to just about everything including OS, Internet, programs, mashups, or who-knows-what ultimately. There seem to be some developments for moving on from web browser technology as we know it right now, although the browser will stay with us in one form or another for long time to come. Telco’s tiny apps as being demonstrated by Apple and Google lately could become the next new kids on the block which may fit well with the up-and-coming Cloud Computing. I believe if EMC cannot or won’t implement its own document product portfolios onto the Cloud, the very space including Documentum would not be able to sustain its niche at EMC because it can’t compete effectively with others like SharePoint. I guess the time will tell, indeed. Good conversing with you as well.

Brian

PS: Johnny – I agree that the customer might not be interested in buying infrastructure or platform for content products as of yet. Ironically, however, the same customers are buying SharePoint because it is tightly coupled with platform and infrastructure. I understand that’s because Microsoft is one of the huge incumbents of the current infrastructure in spite of SharePoint’s shortcomings. I may be wrong, but, I believe the new Cloud Computing paradigm could potentially be just the one that could replace Microsoft’s incumbency.