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Adaptive Case Management

By IGI Global on Jul 16, 2010
IGI Global would like to thank Antonio Zilli for this guest editorial post on Knowledge Management. He is research fellow at e-business management section at the Scuola Superiore Isufi – Univeristy of Salento (Lecce, Italy). His research interests regard the technologies that enable powerful virtual collaboration in communities and organizations. Currently, he is in the program board of the international conference on knowledge management in organization and has a book published by IGI Global titled Semantic Knowledge Management: An Ontology-Based Framework.

In this last year an important debate in the Business Process Management (BPM) community(1) is going on about a new emerging discipline or technology in the field of business process management: it seems to be called Adaptive Case Management (ACM). It seems! Because many discussions have been made about the appropriate label to be used for it: Advanced or Agile or Adaptive Case Management, Dynamic or Unstructured BPM, etc. Do these labels imply the same meaning? As it was predictable, not really! Different words usually are used to mean different things! But let's start from the beginning. What is Case Management? Case Management is basically the activity of managing a case, that is a specific instance of a process [WfMC, 1999]. In a classic workflow old-style fashion: a company has to put in place "a sequence of activities", namely a Process, "to manage an order", in example a specific order (i.e. order no.15) placed by a specific customer (i.e. Mr John Doe) to buy a specific product (i.e. mobile phone NZM580), this is a Case. What kind of Processand Howto handle that Case is what Case Management is really about. The fundamental characteristic of Case Management is the "unstructured" and not predictable in advance progression of a case, from the beginning to the end, which cannot be fixed in a predefined template, that is in a Process Definition [WfMC, 1999]. The sequence of steps in a process (flow logic), the paths, the conditions determining a path to follow (routing logic) cannot be defined in advance. It's a matter of events, rules and human decisions to determine the sequence of activities and the paths for each new case, while it is running (at run-time). One of the industry segment in which Case Management is most important is the Healthcare. Typically a doctor gather patient's health information, helps him to treat the disease reviewing advantages and disadvantages of each option and finally defining a treatment plan, coordinates the treatment implementation with other healthcare providers, regularly evaluates the progress of care following patients in inpatient to ambulatory to community, adapt the treatment plan if required, updates patient's medical record in collaboration with relevant health professionals involved in patient's care. Another typical example is the legal profession where it is common to refer to the complete collection of documents for a case as the "case file". To sum up, Case Management can be deemed to be the handling of a particular kind of processes: non-routine work processes ( http://kswenson.wordpress.com/2009/09/23/what-is-case-management/). These are work processes that are not predictable in advance, the type of work processes performed by knowledge workers.
Are they still to be considered as processes? Yes, sure. The fact that the sequence of activities cannot be predefined does not prevent them to be identified and grouped in a Process which has a specific goal and output. They are usually referred as "Ad-hoc Processes" [BPMN, 2009], not to be confused with "Ad-hoc Processes" as defined by CMMI [CMMI, 2009] which appear chaotic and not manageable by the support organization. Speaking in CMMI terms "non-routine work processes" are "Defined Processes difficult to Institutionalize". Why Adaptive? As it was mentioned at the beginning of this post, there are several definitions of Adaptive Case Management and of the combination of terms around it ( http://kswenson.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/the-word-for-331-is-adaptive/). Each of them adds a subtle nuance to the definition of Adaptive Case Management. But in essence they enforce the difference between BPM and ACM. Classic BPM focuses on process improvements from a strongly process-centred point of view. First, analyse your process. Then model it! Define the precise sequence of tasks, the alternative/concurrent paths and their branch conditions, the tasks information used as input and output, the data sources and so on. Next, implement the process model in a typical top-down approach. During the process execution, data are gathered elsewhere, through the "information systems", and collected in a process instance which follows from the beginning to the end always in the same predetermined manner [Zur Muehlen, 2005]. BPM deals with process tasks, task data, tracking of process history, task notification to people, people authorized by roles to view task data, events. The same objects are present in ACM, which also aims at improving the performance of an organization, but, instead of considering the process as primary, it focuses on the case information and the human-centred work.
In ACM, the case information becomes the system of records for the human work, which will be accessed until the case is alive, acting as a collector of business data, documents, tasks, events, processes (business entities). Sure, there can be processes, but the processes are brought to the case, and run in its context. Progression in the case is made through events, human decisions and business rules determine how to proceed. New tasks or processes are added at run-time if new activities arise and a new activity plan is needed. Documents, as important as task data, are versioned and stored. The case is tracked and can be audited in every step to verify its proper advancement. In ACM, business users are allowed to create/consolidate processes from business entities directly in the execution phase (a bottom-up approach). The analysis of collected cases may identify a pattern created by business users and raises the need for a process to be established. This confirms that BPM and ACM are useful in two different situations: the first in highly predictable and repeatable business situations, such as order management; the second in unpredictable and unrepeatable situations, such as medical treatment, court cases, etc. where being adaptive is the key to achieve better performances.
BPM has a broad implementation in several BPMS commercial solutions. Case Management is actually supported by Groupware, Enterprise Content Management and new Human-centred BPM applications. But a major shift in current technologies is needed to be able to add that Adaptive word to Case Management. Hence it is a technology gap that must be recovered to realize ACM. Adaptive Case Management (ACM) can be defined as an information technology that exposes structured and unstructured business information (business data and content) and allows structured (business) and unstructured (social) organizations to execute work (routine and emergent processes) in a secure but transparent manner ( www.xpdl.org/nugen/p/adaptive-case-management/public.htm).(2)

To send a message to the authors, please e-mail them at: Antonio Caforio, antonio.caforio@ebms.unile.it, Antonio Zilli, antonio.zill@ebms.unile.it.

Notes:
1. BPM Community:
2. For the ones who noted that How to handle Cases in Adaptive Case Management has not been further elaborated, follow this blog for the next ACM developments. Bibliography
  • [BPMN, 2009] Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) specifications v1.2, OMG Document Number: formal/2009-01-03, p.128, January 2009
  • [CMMI, 2009] CMMI for Development v1.2, CMU/SEI-2006-TR-008, pp.36-40, August 2008
  • [Zur Muehlen, 2006] Zur Muehlen, M., Ho, D.T.-Y., Risk Management in the BPM lifecycle, BPM Workshops, LNCS n.3812, pp.454-466, 2006
  • [WfMC, 1999] Workflow Management Coalition Terminology & Glossary, Document Number: WFMC-TC-1011, Document Status - Issue 3.0, February 1999
Semantic Knowledge Management: An Ontology-Based Framework
Semantic Knowledge Management: An Ontology-Based Framework addresses the Semantic Web from an operative point of view using theoretical approaches, methodologies, and software applications as innovative solutions to true knowledge management. This advanced title provides readers with critical steps and tools for developing a semantic based knowledge management system.

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