Making the Case for Case

This kind of case management requires a robust and active knowledgebase. And sometimes the "knowledge" is not documented-it's in a person's head. I asked Hans to what degree does his customerbase consider expertise location a critical function. "Oh, absolutely," he said. "In many ways we think of this as one of the defining characteristics of case management versus BPM. Basically, we consider BPM the mechanism to automate processes to the greatest degree to exclude people. Case management, on the contrary, fosters collaboration and is all about including people." I like that.

"It's not just about organizing the logistic flow of moving a process from one stage to the next, it's more about providing collaboration facilities and social capabilities to allow the knowledge worker to find and tap the person who knows the most about this particular situation. A knowledge repository is still important," Hans added. "It is the more formal distillery of the knowledge and experiences that have been captured by the organization. The worker should also be able to hook into content management systems, to find documents and correspondences." By providing all those resource to the fingertips of the knowledge worker, is, Hans told me, the key to getting to the best possible outcome.

Even though case management is a movable target of personal judgment, corporate information and good old intuition, there are ways to support it. "There are several technologies we believe are extremely relevant to be put in the hand of the knowledge worker. For one, we think there should be one single user interface. We try to avoid, to the greatest extent we can, a ‘swivel-chair' integration. The user should not have to go into multiple applications to find the information that is relevant. So search is relevant, the knowledge repository we've already discussed may be relevant. The goal is to consult the underlying transaction histories and systems of record through an integration that allows us to populate the information the worker needs. Both structured and unstructured," Hans said. In the case of the emergency organization, that can mean accessing everything from the accident history of the automobile from government records to the insurance company's policy to the location of the closest ice cream shoppe (I made that last one up, but you get the idea).

When you look at BPM and case management together, it becomes a mobius strip of intertwined processes. Case management solutions, over time, become hardwired into BPM processes. BPM processes create the history from which case management is forged. Organizations learn by doing... good ones do anyway. Read on to learn some more about this fascinating, rapidly evolving, business management phenomenon.