IBM ECM

IBM Case Manager is effective at taking complex processes with a lot of parallel activities and automating them into a seamless solution to improve productivity, information accuracy and retention of information.

Processes can be broken down into defined roles and tasks making it easier for companies to understand how transactions flow through their organization.

IBM Enterprise Content Management has become a robust suite of complimentary products so there is a "cafeteria plan" to choose from that allows a company to craft a solution that will align tremendously well with their business needs.

The product suite has tremendous flexibility, but along with flexibility comes complexity. Configuring environments and installing the software so solutions can be implemented requires a broad base of IT knowledge.

In recent releases, IBM has concentrated on making the UIs across the different software products in the ECM family more consistent, and this has been well received by customers.

IBM also focuses on making a lot of changes in each release to improve flexibility and collaboration for application developers.

We have seen our customers realize increased employee efficiency by reducing the amount of time it takes to process a transaction.

We have seen improvements in customer service because information can be made more readily available to customer service personnel who are fielding service calls.

We have seen improvements in decision making because processing-related statistics are more readily available to the managers who need the input to make quality business decisions that affect the day-to-day operations.

Speaking of IBM Case Manager in particular, we believe that just about every business process involving the effort of knowledge workers can be enhanced and automated using IBM Case Manager. If a process or set of tasks requires the judgment, decision-making skills, and experience of a knowledge worker, then the process can be configured for IBM Case Manager. If the process is dynamic and requires flexibility such that the business outcome depends upon the choices and decisions made during the process, then IBM Case Manager is the ideal solution for automation, tracking, and collaboration of such work.

With regards to Content Management, we are particularly fond of and adept at utilizing both IBM Content Collector, IBM Classification Manager, and IBM Enterprise Records. As business communications have changed over the last 20 years, the growth of digital content housed within the burgeoning storage silos located throughout a company's infrastructure has swelled to nearly unmanageable levels. This impacts them in numerous ways; from the direct costs associated with ever increasing storage, to the unknowable costs associated with the legal liability of content residing on their systems, to the lost opportunity of un-mined customer data residing on their systems. All of these impacts can be mitigated by the application of IBM Content Management and Content Analytics.

To me personally, I believe the greatest strength of products like these are their immense configurability. Depending upon the business requirements of the customer, systems such as those mentioned above can be configured in almost inexhaustible arrangements to accomplish just about any task that can be imagined - all to satisfy the needs and requirements of the demands of the business. From collecting email from mail servers and evaluating it for its context, not just it's content, in order to determine its worth to the organization, to creating File Plans for storing content in a smart repository which makes possible content lifecycle management and defensible disposal, IBM just does this better than any other products I am familiar with.

In terms of weaknesses or negatives associated with using IBM products, to me only the cost and complexity are barriers. The cost puts these solutions out of the range of many mid-size to smaller companies who could benefit from the solutions provided by their products. As a Systems Engineer with responsibility to design and deploy solutions, the learning curve is steep and lengthy. Well worth the effort, but it requires a commitment and dedication.

With regards to that, I'm always challenged when learning the technology.

We have not run the numbers for our clients, but there is no question that the groups we have helped with systems deployments experience a number of improvements. Many of the most obvious are reduced costs associated with storage and disposal, reduced costs associated with task processing time and overall process duration, increased productivity through visibility into bottlenecks and the correction of work slowdowns due to bottlenecks, and better visibility into actual production within the organization for reporting purposes.

Scalability

Flexibility

Security

As enterprise and mid-market systems go, the price is highly competitive (especially when you consider what's included in the license). That said, this product is not accessible for small businesses as a self hosted solution. The "Navigator on Cloud" solution is much more accessible, but gives less control over data.

To get all the features, there are many moving parts. For large enterprises, this is no problem, and the cloud solution obviates most of these concerns.

My customers see enhanced employee efficiency, improved customer service and savings in discovery activities.

Working with documents, records and work objects

Controlling who can see my stuff (Security)

Creating and saving searches

Some System Administrator Functions can be cumbersome, although this is an area of great recent improvement... (Creating Document Classes, establishing default instance security and class object security)

Designing Workflows must be done through an out-dated and nearly deprecated web tool and is not integrated into any of the core Interfaces