Part2: Case Management white paper – Extract No. 2

Michael White, 29 June 2009

A little later than promised, here’s the first extract from our white paper “Case Management – combining process with knowledge”,.  You can also download the full white paper from  http://www.singularity.co.uk/case-management-whitepaper.lit.  In the white paper we explain what case management is, relate it to the broader subject of how knowledge workers do their jobs, and identify the characteristics that have made knowledge intensive processes difficult to automate in the past. We show how a Business Process Management approach with specific support for knowledge intensive processes provides the most appropriate solution to Case Management.

Part 1:  What is Case Management?

“For about fifteen years I’ve been doing research on business processes and how they can be improved.  I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important processes for organizations today involve knowledge work.  In the past, these haven’t really been the focus of most organizations – improving administrative and operational processes has been easier – but they must be in the future.”

Tom Davenport, “Thinking for a Living” Harvard Business School Press, 2005

Case Management is critical to the work of many organizations, and is a common approach to supporting knowledge intensive process.  Case management, also known as case handling, describes the way organizations such as government agencies, banks, big legal firms and insurance providers handle complex customer and service interactions. 

In collaborative environments, where knowledge workers work together on a process deliverable, the case management representation is the predominant process representation. 
Marc Kerremans, Gartner, “Case management is a Challenging BPMS Use Case”, 8 Dec 2008

A ‘case’ refers to the set of interactions with a customer and other relevant participants, from initiation to completion, to fulfill some service request.  An  example might be “apply for an immigration visa” or “resolve my complaint about being billed too much”.

Examples of Case Management

Area	Case type
Government	Social welfare benefits applications Licensing and permits management Freedom of Information Enquiries Planning applications Industrial Health and Safety Enforcement Immigration applications Regulatory monitoring
Law enforcement	Firearms licensingInvestigations Forensics management
Financial Services	Corporate customer on-boarding Regulatory compliance management Insurance claim processing Trade Settlement exception management
Telecommunications	Customer provisioning Fault reporting and resolution Billing issue resolution

In the past, cases would have been managed using a manila folder of documents and records, with the folder moving through a department or organization from one in-tray to the next while the case was evaluated and progressed.  Evaluation of the case would involve correspondence, phone calls, meetings and notes being appended to provide a record of the progress of the case.  The staff working on the case, known as ‘case workers’, would be knowledgeable about their organization and how previous cases had been progressed, and would be empowered to use their judgment and discretion when deciding how some part of the current case should be handled.  Cases might follow a general pattern, but each particular case would take its own unique path from initiation to resolution depending on the circumstances of the individual whose case was being handled.

Case management is often intensely manual, paper-driven, plagued by delay and poor visibility, with isolated parts of the process automated by legacy systems or spreadsheets.  There are two main reasons why case management is so poorly supported.  Firstly, it is inherently more difficult to automate than other processes because of the extent to which case processes must support human knowledge, judgment and discretion to determine their outcome.  It is harder to manage the complexity and unpredictability of a case than, say, automating payroll processing or credit card transaction processing.  Secondly, the available technology simply hasn’t been able to support the requirements for dynamic-user driven changes to cases as they progress. 

Defining Case Management

There are no universally accepted definitions available for case management.  We define it as follows:

Case Management is the management of long-lived collaborative processes that coordinate knowledge, content, correspondence and resources to progress a case to achieve a particular goal; where the path of execution cannot be predetermined in advance of execution; where human judgment is required to determine how the end goal can be achieved; and where the state of a case can be altered by external out-of-band events. 

In the next extract, we’ll look at the characteristics of case management a little more closely before considering how it can be properly supported by technology.

Author : Dermot McCauley

Tags: BPM, Case-Management, Collaboration

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