James Taylor's Decision Management

Phil Ayres had a great post today - BPM or ERP - Stand out from the crowd, in which he discusses the value of case management and its ability to help you differentiate. For instance, he asks the question "Does your claims process really differentiate from the competition?". After all you probably use more or less an industry standard process for filing, checking and paying claims. Indeed you might even outsource large chunks of it. Phil's POV is that case management, the unstructured or semi-structured part of handling claims, for instance, is one way to really differentiate yourself. And so it is. But even within a standard process you have a way to build in differentiation while still using standard processes.

Think about it. At several points in the process you must take business decisions as to what to do next. If you take these decisions differently from your competitors (being stricter about which claims to pay quickly or more relaxed about when to send out an adjuster, for instance), then you will seem differentiated to customers. The use of decision services to manage these decision points in a process is thus a great way to differentiate you even if you use a commodity process. I wrote an article on this last year, also - using business rules to resist commoditization of processes.

So don't be fooled into thinking your process is likely to differentiate you most of the time. Case management might, decision services will.