From content to cases

Guest post by Lee Dallas

Since the various announcements and keynotes at EMC World in May, there has been considerable discussion over whether or not EMC is truly moving away from content management as a focus in the Documentum brand and realigning to pursue case management under the xCP banner. Rather than debate the messaging though, in this post I will address my view of the changes in the market that these announcements reflect.

Referring to this as a perceived shift from content to case is probably an oversimplification of both the strategy and broader changes in the ECM market. Since the earliest days of ECM, collaborative case management has been a popular and heavily promoted use case. EMC is not alone now in beating the case management drum. For all the recent interest, it is worth noting that Open Text’s approach in the case management space was first announced in 2008 and updated for 2010 with their frame work for SharePoint. In this offering Open Text attempts to be, as they have in other categories, a gap filler for SharePoint. IBM as well has announced a new campaign around what they are calling Adaptive Case Management in response to apparent growing market interest.

On the campaign trail

I refer to all these efforts as campaigns rather than products at this point because in most cases the initial launches were not net new products. The case management approach by these mega players for the most part begins with recasting a subset of their existing portfolio or configurations as a case management toolkit or platform.

It is unfair though to think of any of these as simply marketing. The concepts lead to changes in more than the way the products are packaged and sold. As important as messaging is, for the efforts to be successful the substance of these traditional ECM stacks has to grow to accommodate gaps that buyers of case management and other technologies see in content-oriented software. Case management features, which had been delivered by partners and integrators, will inevitably drift down into the various platforms and become part of the core over time.

The question that remains for many though is: Why? Why would well established leaders in the content management space apparently shift their direction (i.e. messaging) away from the market they helped to define? The shift (real or imagined) is really about responding to changes in buying patterns and decision making within organizations. These players must create differentiation from basic content management which is being commoditized by both SharePoint and open source offerings. Competing with free, or rather with the perception of free, is possible but not sustainable over time without expanding the value of the product line to the end users in other ways.

Apples and ERP's

Beyond commoditization the vendors are challenged by an increasing lack of tolerance for ambiguity. Selling common base platforms had once been a very effective strategy but technology buyers in general are becoming less inclined to invest in abstract functional capabilities. To defend the former practice, comparisons were often drawn between ECM and ERP and supporting an argument that technology that spans the organization requires a large monolithic approach. While this makes some sort of conceptual sense there is a fundamental difference in the manner that ERP has been deployed. In every case, ERP is broken into logical modules that compartmentalize the implementation and change management dimensions. HR, Finance and Supply Chain are all separate top level components and rarely rolled out simultaneously.

In a given organization, ECM is rarely able to emulate ERP in this way. Content too often spans organizational boundaries in structure, substance and process. Though some had limited success in managing content across these logical divisions, the challenges to implementations with diverse constituents and broad change impact but without consolidated executive support have contributed to an inordinately large failure rate in ECM efforts.

Case management and content management are in no way synonymous. Content management though is a foundational and enabling technology for case management. Promoting content management enhanced to support case management however elevates content into a set of more practical and less abstract scenarios. These scenarios are more relevant across multiple lines of business than discreet content types and the paradigm promotes a more easily identified organizational ownership. Finally the discreet transactions may be no different but placing the interaction of the user with the content into the context of a case provides a conceptual structure that is more easily understood, communicated and justified.

The road ahead

The challenge to the industry now is to identify and develop the other categories of this layer above the commoditized content capability. Then to clearly articulate how they fit into a new content powered ecosystem. This layer encompasses logical blocks of applications and services (like case management) that are assembled or profiled to meet the needs of a specific line of business, forming what Gartner now calls composite applications. In the end though case management remains only one of many potential feature domains what will develop in the coming years. No doubt we can expect even more changes in messaging and positioning from every vendor as they realign to the changing needs and expectations of content burdened organizations.

Lee Dallas has over seventeen years of experience in content management and is one of the founding bloggers of the Big Men On Content. Currently a part of EMC’s Alliance Partner team, he was formerly a technical publishing and Documentum architect at Delta Air Lines, senior architect for content management at The Home Depot, and a principal consultant with Armedia, LLC.