As part of my community manager role here at ebizQ, I author a monthly series of business process management (BPM) feature articles highlighting different BPM software approaches taken in different industries--and across all industries--hopefully highlighting what real users are doing.
One of the functions I'm hearing a lot about is case management, as illustrated in Roeland Loggen's comment on my January 21 blog post concerning "unstructured processes." Roeland said:
"In my opinion, when companies will adopt BPM and BPM technology, they will need to realize (and will encounter) the fact that current BPM thinking and supporting technology is primarily focused on structured and predictable processes. Some support more dynamic processes with concepts such as case management" (emphasis added).
So in March I will be researching and preparing a feature article about the case-management aspects of BPM. Previous industry-specific articles have covered BPM in Insurance, BPM in Financial Services (certainly a hot topic in 2008), BPM in Government (sure to be a hot topic in 2009 at least in the U.S.), and so forth. In addition to such industry-specific examples, other articles in 2008 covered SOA vis a vis BPM, and the Role of BPM in Enterprise Governance. The latest feature, BPM in Accounting," should appear soon on ebiQ.
I am looking for examples of how BPM is used in case management, whether you interpret that category from a generic cross-industry human-centric point of view or whether you mean specifically cases in law, healthcare, etc. I want to look at the concept of case management, whatever that concept means to you.
If you sell such a product, I will email you the survey instrument. Just send me an email at dennis@ebizq.net. If you have recently completed a survey for one of the earlier feature articles, just send me an email highlighting key case management features of your product. In either case, if you would prefer to be interviewed, put that in the email and we can set up a time.
If you are an IT guy or BPM expert--an employee or consultant--using or implementing case management, send me an email and I will contact you.
The article on BPM Case Management is tentatively scheduled for release in late March/early April 2009 so whether you are a user or a supplier, contact me by Monday March 16, 2009.
-- Dennis Byron
Dennis,
over the past three years I have been working with a number of BPM vendors including Filenet, Graham Technology, Metastorm, Lombardi and more recently Pega Systems.
With each of these organisations I have worked to build a case management framework as the basis of a solution that that will address a number of business issues across a number of industries.
For me case management allows an organisation to manage structured and unstructured information within the context of a defined process. The process can be either event or data based, intra or extra enterprise.
Case management at it's most abstract is a process initiated by an event either time based or incident based, that allows a user to assess the event and make a decision on how to respond to that event using existing policy and procedure. It also manages exceptions by routing to knowledge workers who apply knowledge about the organisation to develop exceptional responses which are either one off's or themselves become policies which can be incorporated into the process.
In an internal article I wrote that case management is made up of the following elements:
• Process management – documented process that is
• Process metrics and intelligence
• Rules Management
• Document Management
• Collaboration utilities
Hence the solution I built allows a user to define and execute a business process in a bpm tool, store. Monitor the effectiveness of the process using real time business analytics. Adapt that process to changing business events by adjusting
parameters e.g. interest rates on a loan product,
policies - do no insure males under 21 with a driving conviction or
processes – create a new process to handle complaints about service
The solution stores documents, emails IM / skype conversations securely linking them to the incident or event.