Doh - Case Management

What is it with Case Management?

I’ve been suffering from writers block for the past month – when you settle down to build something new and different it takes a lot of focused effort and I must have put that at the back of mind – hence the lack of blogs, reactions to linked-in comments and no involvement on those (often odd) questions posed on ebizq. Ah well – I now think I’ve got everything under control and aiming for a fall release of the first beta – with customers – so that will be cool me thinks – keep watching I promise it’ll be worth it.

So this blog is about things that have amazed me and disappointed me – nothing thus far to make the blood boil – just day to day stuff that crops up when trying to pull things together.

One thing I was very keen to do during the design phase of the product was to find a way of simulating or prototyping the whole thing – I looked high and low for a tool that would let me visualize what I had in my head and get it documented. Someone told me about a product called iRise and if you are into building systems, apps or whatever take a look at this tool. It is absolutely brilliant – I don’t normally advertise products but I will in this instance – in just a few days (5 all in – would have been less save for the slight problem with how it works with Chrome – please fix) I was able to build a working model of the product, produce documentation and show it to people - especially the developers – show and tell has never been so good. If I was handling strategy for iRise I’d be figuring out a way of adding some cort of video capability similar to something like Camtasia. Anyway check it out.

The other thing that struck me this month is the sudden focus and rise in interest in the subject of case management. Now Case Management is not a new phenomena. It is, and always has been, at the heart of many good workflow tools and is, quite frankly, what most customers used to think they were buying when the bought workflow products. The proof points are there to see, Palas Athena, Global360, arguably Singularity, all have long established, well defined proven products for handling case management. And recently I see that IBM have finally woken up to the value of such a tool – and it was this move that really prompted me to write this blog.

I saw a blog entry by Forrester which really made me laugh, and I promise I’m not taking the P%*ss out of them but really what do you expect when you read a comment like:

"The offering is built to solve a business problem. Rather than technology looking for a business need, IBM's case management offering is designed to address a broad issue that exists today. These complex, long running business processes involve numerous stakeholders and span multiple systems, some of which are operational, some content-centric, some collaborative, some analytic, etc. The coordination of the many people and disparate systems offers great opportunity for driving efficiency."

No shit! Isn’t that what all software applications and products are supposed to do? What’s more interesting though is the implied comment that BPM is a technology looking for a business need or am I reading too much into it.

Anyway for the avoidance of any doubt I am delighted that Case is finally, after many years, getting its moment in the sun. But why is Case Management so important? Well BPM is too inflexible for the human aspects of a business process. My first boss in EDP (as it was called) once said to me that computers will do what you tell them, people will always mess you about – and that holds true more today than ever before.

We have to deal with the unexpected. This is not just about using a set of tools to deal with every anticipated business outcome or rule; we are talking about the management of true interaction that takes place between individuals and groups which cannot be predicted or encapsulated beforehand. This is because Business Processes exist at 2 levels—the predictable (the systems) and the un-predictable (the people).

The predictable aspects of the process are easily and well-catered for by BPMS solutions—which is why the term Business Process Management is aruably a misnomer since the perceived technology addresses only the integration aspects—with the close coupling with SOA (SOA needs BPM, the converse is not true) there is an argument for renaming BPM to Services Process Management (SPM).

Understanding that the business processes exist at two levels (the Silicon and the Carbon) takes us a long way towards understanding the need for case management. The key point is to recognize that the unpredictable actions of the carbon components are not ad-hoc processes, nor are they exception handling (ask anyone with a six sigma background about exceptions and you’ll understand very quickly what I mean). This is all about the unstructured interactions between people—in particular knowledge workers. Process based technology that understands the needs of people and supports the inherent “spontaneity” of the human what makes Case Management so vitally important.