Call of Duty – Jury Duty that is

I had the privilege/honor/civic duty to be a juror last week, which lasted over a week BTW. I have been called to jury duty twice before. The first time, I showed up and within a few hours, the court decided that they had picked enough jurors for the day. The second time, I got a bit closer to being a juror. I was actually selected to a jury panel, where both the prosecutors and defense attorneys asked questions to see if I was an unbiased juror. I tried getting out by stating someone in my family was in the law enforcement field. That did not excuse me; however, I was not selected to be a juror. This time I was not so lucky. After two days of juror selection, I was chosen as one of 14 jurors (12 plus two alternates) to determine if the defendant was guilty of a capital crime.

One may ask what this has to do with Documentum. Well, after being sitting through three days of deliberation and reviewing all of the evidence that was presented, it occurred to me that even though the court house provided free Wi-Fi for the public, there was not much technology being used by the court beyond that. Here are some scenarios that technology could have helped in the presentation and review of evidence:

1) Both prosecutors and defense attorneys made references to past grand jury testimonies. In order to present this material to the witness on the stand, both sides had to explicitly identify the grand jury testimony, date, and line numbers that were being referenced. Each side would take a minute or two to find the appropriate testimony (document), flip to the appropriate page, and review the lines that were being referenced.

2) Several DVDs from a security camera were presented as evidence. The prosecutor had to spend 5-10 minutes locating the appropriate frames from the multiple DVDs to present to the court. When we (the jury) had to review the DVDs, we spent as much, if not more time to scan through DVD and find the appropriate frames.

3) One piece of evidence that was presented was a hand drawn diagram depicting the crime scene. The diagram showed where people were located, the various streets, and specific houses. Even though the picture was simple, it was hard to align/rotate this with respect to other images that were presented.

4) About 10 photos were enlarged and introduced as evidence as well. These photos were printed on large poster boards and every time each side wanted to talk about these images, they would have to set up an easel in front of the jurors and then take it down afterward.

Now if you review these scenarios, you can easily see where some sort of content management solution (e.g. Documentum) could be developed to facilitate/improve how this evidence is presented and stored for future reference. If I was building a courtroom solution (which obviously would built upon a records repository), here are some features that I would include to solve these issues:

1) Testimonies would be stored as records. Renditions of the appropriate documents would be generated with irrelevant parts redacted. These renditions would be readily available to all parties (including jury).

2) Video would be stored as records as well. Clips of the video could be generated from the source and the clips would be readily available to all parties. Interestingly, the other parts of the DVD that were not relevant were not redacted prior to us viewing it. Not sure if this was due to lack of technology and the redaction was not required.

3) Having a 3-D representation of the street, building, and person would be helpful for all parties to see. Creating this would obviously take some time, but there has to be some simple tools out there to do this. Just take a look at the 3-D tools that major home improvement stores provide to help customers build a 3-D view of their kitchen.

4) This is just simple digital asset management.

I hope that the next time I’m called to be a juror; this kind of technology will be made available to the court. I can personally say that a few hours can be saved from both the trial and deliberation part of the case.

2010 – Year of the Tiger

2009 was pitiful year of blogging for me. I just wasn’t inspired by product enhancements and new EMC technologies last year. Sure, the public release of CMIS was a big moment in the standardization of content management features across multiple vendors EMC participation was critical, but does having CMIS sell more products/licenses or affect existing clients. I see adoption of CMIS having a larger impact in the coming years. Cloud computing is becoming more prevalent; however, the since Documentum does not fully support multi-tenancy, Documentum as SaaS does not exist it.

2010 is going to be a better. Here are the highlights of my predictions for 2010. Detail description can be found in my “Letter from CTO” on the NEW Beach Street Blog.

1) Software revenue for ECM products will be at least 20% higher than 2009. A lot customers interested in ECM implementation held off buying anything due to the state of the economy.

2) xCP (aka Documentum) will become the mainstay for CMA. Webtop will still be supported for some time to come, given that most of the UI features have not been ported to xCP (e.g. apply retention). CenterStage will continue to be sold to customer whose only need is to collaborate. However, if you assume that companies are going to invest in automating their business processes and improving employee efficiency, xCP is the only product in EMC that can support this within a short deployment cycle.

3) CEVAs (Content Enabled Vertical Applications) will be the focus for new customers. Most of sales calls I have been involves new customers wanting a vendor that provides a solution that addresses their particular problems (verticals) while providing an architecture/framework that will allow the growth and addition of other solutions. xCP allows partners to build solutions rapidly to address specific needs in a vertical.

One final note, I am delighted that my company as well as all of our consultants have committed to start sharing our technical knowledge and experience through Beach Street Blog. While my blog will continue to focus on architecture discussions, the Beach Street blog will strive to provide information on multitude of products as well from people at various technical skill levels. One our senior Documentum developers has already created posted her reactions to Momentum Europe – Athens.