Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus starts with the statement “The world is everything that is the case”. I’ve never got far past that sentence, being diverted into pondering whether it’s a synthetic or analytic a-priori truth and crashing my operating system. Anyway, it serves to highlight the difficulty with the meaning of the word “case”.

I spent some time yesterday in the company of our head of marketing, our head of business development, our head of R&D and an analyst, and after an hour we gave up on trying to nail the jelly that is case-management to the ceiling and moved on. It’s bothering me though. In the real world we understand very well what a “case” is. It’s a patient presenting with symptoms. It’s a client with a problem that needs resolved. It’s an unsolved crime. And it’s anything else with similar characteristics. We have no difficulty in appreciating that the “case” is all of the investigative work, discussion and opinion forming, action planning and execution, plus all of the documents, notes, correspondence and other artefacts found or created in the course of progressing the matter.

Crucially there is a “goal” – a case always has an outcome in mind: a return to good health, an agreed settlement, a successful conviction. You can’t have an open-ended case – it has a start-point, and it has an end-point, and in between there are many standard activities and processes which may be needed, and that need is determined as the case progresses. It has parallelism, and it has sequencing. Steps in similar cases may occur in a different order depending on resource availability, judgement or preference. You can of course have the classic “open and shut” case where no further data is needed, there is no need to debate the options and the outcome can be achieved directly.

So given we take all of this for granted and don’t trip ourselves up when we use the word “case” in the real world, why do we have difficulties in explaining it in the world of BPMS? We have engineered our product around the need to support “cases” and to enable complexity while giving it structure and rigour but it remains a frequent challenge to explain to others just what it is we have to offer. Is “case” just complexity? That doesn’t seem right – you can have extremely complex processes, and processes embedded in other processes, but complexity alone doesn’t make it a “case” – it requires human involvement and judgement to turn it into a case. Are unstructured processes and cases the same thing? That doesn’t feel right – you can have unstructured processes without the informational artefacts that seem to be a feature of any case. In fact, the very word “case” suggests the idea of a container of documents.

Cases may well (probably nearly always do) involve unstructured processes assembled “on-the-fly” to progress towards the goal, but that doesn’t make them the same thing. We could take an abstract point of view and say that a Case is “this process template, representation or pattern” and that may be a useful thing to do in some contexts, but it’s not at all a satisfying way to explain it – especially not to a potential customer who needs to understand that his procurement process is really an example of case management and not the simple linear process that he liked to believe it was.

So here’s my new attempt to “nail the jelly”. If we consider a business process on 2 dimensions:

• X: from deterministic to unstructured human judgement driven (ad hoc, on-the-fly)
• Y: from structured data-centric (e.g. databases) to unstructured data-centric (documents, emails, correspondence, notes, images)

Then as soon as you move away from the axes, you’re in the world of case, and the further you go, the more that’s the case.

And as we now readily accept that 80% or more of an enterprise’s data assets are unstructured, I think we’ll have to accept that 80% of its processes are also unstructured, and therefore usually “case”.

I’ll conclude by paraphrasing Wittgenstein; “The case is almost everything that is the world… of BPMS”.

About the Author: Paul Moorhead is the Product Manager at Singularity.

Author : Paul O’Neill

Tags: BPM, BPMS, Business-Process, business-process-management, Case-Management, Process

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 at 10:17 am and is filed under BPM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.