Advanced case management and BPM: Better together

Nancy Pearson, Vice President of BPM, SOA and WebSphere Marketing, talks about how BPM relates to advanced case management, common entry points for BPM projects, and how financial institutions can work smarter to deal with the increasing complexity in their industry. Read her commentary.

Advanced Case Management (ACM) provides organizations tangible benefits such as improvements to knowledge worker effectiveness and business insight as well as improved responsiveness and flexibility in adapting to market changes. ACM further enables world-class customer service and risk mitigation through adherence to regulatory compliance. Technically, ACM represents an amalgam of capabilities integrated in context to help case and knowledge workers make better decisions and drive better outcomes.

Many case management solutions traditionally have had their start in business process management (BPM) or enterprise content management (ECM) roots. Indeed, many organizations have used BPM in particular as a foundation for case management, given the relationship between process exceptions and cases that must be created to solve them. Thus, key questions hotly debated among technology and business professionals are:

• “What is the difference between ACM and BPM?”
• “Are they the same?”
• “If not, how do they work in concert?”

To address these questions accurately, it’s useful to understand the role of the knowledge worker, or case worker, in today’s environment, particularly given the advent of BPM and other technology tools. BPM offers organizations the ability to automate and optimize many types of processes, adding dynamism to growing business networks comprised of tightly and loosely coupled business partners around the globe. As it has evolved, BPM has addressed straight-through processes and ad-hoc processes, providing organizations the flexibility to change their business rules and processes to meet ever-changing market conditions. However, neither every process nor every situation can be automated. In many instances, a person is still required to make a decision. And, increasingly, those decisions have become dependent upon retrieving and understanding pertinent information, consulting with subject matter experts, and conducting current and historic analysis of supporting data and content.

In short, there is a parallel universe of sorts in which a business process may exist, but case workers are charged with making critical decisions or taking actions in situations that are unplanned or are unsuited to automation. Further, it may be desirous to provide knowledge workers with the right environment from the start that provides a unified view of the information, activities, analytics and growing history associated with key business objects such as a customer, product, claim, account, loan, and so on.

So where do these worlds of ACM and BPM begin and end, and are they actually different? To provide clarity, consider the following concepts: Business process management focuses on optimization of a process with a key goal to increase the volume of throughput or work completed for that process. Case management has a different “design goal” and focuses on optimization of outcomes for individual cases by providing an integrated set of information and services for the case worker. Let’s first understand what confronts the case worker or, for example, a customer service representative who might work a case.

When an issue occurs that demands a case worker’s attention, relevant information may be retrieved – either in the context of a case or a logical file folder if it had already been established – or it can be compiled and a case created. This case information – the variety of documents, data, correspondence and other forms of supporting content – must persist for an extended period of time and is also comprised of case events or actions that have taken place, requests made for approvals or related decisions, and a record of completed processes required to solve the issues represented by the case.

Consider an individual who is a customer of a financial institution that provides mortgage loans, multiple types of CDs, brokerage accounts and services, and savings and checking accounts. There are similarly many elements of information associated with the creation of those accounts, and for organizations that are eager to possess the oft referred to “360-degree view” of that customer, the ability to not only manage that information and also maintain a history of transactions, requests, correspondence and actions taken by the organization is critical. Since those are typically managed across different systems, repositories and applications, the ability to provide the organization’s knowledge workers a contextually related view of all those items – or perhaps provide many of them in a similar related context to the customer for online viewing and research – is an important part of providing superior customer service. Indeed, the ability to provide all of these together upon the request of a customer service representative when an issue might arise with the individual – say, a payment that wasn’t made or an account mistakenly debited – is what can make competitive difference. But that capability falls outside the realm of the normal business processes used to create the accounts or initiate services for the customer. And other processes may be required to address the situations, such as those exemplified above, meaning that BPM must be closely tied to case management solutions.

Indeed, case management leverages BPM capabilities to address the different types of processes that could be called upon to drive case outcomes. BPM capabilities of modeling, role management and work distribution are key elements in establishing how cases are handled across the organization, and the associated audit trail and governance characteristics can provide important information relative to business performance and in instances of legal discovery. But cases could also call upon complex structured processes, dynamically assembled sets of services, or ad-hoc exchanges that “flow” the case among the entities (including customers) that are required to fulfill or close them. Alternatively, a business process might arrive at a particular point in its life at which a case must be opened, potentially filled, and possibly closed before the process can continue for the entity concerned in the case. Process exceptions, as noted in the beginning of this article, are good examples of this.

BPM excels in exception handling of processes in the following ways. Business rules that are encoded to drive work to particular roles or individuals are often extracted and managed externally to the process to enable more flexibility as well as dynamism in terms of their execution. Further, when exceptions occur, BPM tools enable new processes to be started and can provide the means to create ad-hoc flows to address them.

When exceptions demand that humans intervene and make decisions about how to address them, this can provide an opportunity for case management. Those decisions may call upon all the elements related to the case: information, process, and subject matter experts. This is why advanced case management augments BPM with advanced analytics, social software, decision management, collaboration and content management facilities in an integrated form. Further, these capabilities must be delivered in the context of a case to offer the case worker all pertinent elements required to make decisions affecting the outcome of the case. In this manner, we see how all the technologies associated with advanced case management work together to address exceptions and deliver appropriate outcomes.

Historically, organizations have built case management applications from several of the core technologies noted here, quite often using BPM or ECM as a starting point. While these have been effective, these applications can’t provide the same time-to-value as a more templated, “out-of-the-box” solution will. Additionally, organizations desiring integration among the facilities described have often had to combine them themselves. Advanced case management takes these needs into account and, building upon entry points such as BPM, ECM, decision management and collaboration, offers organizations the ability to provide case and knowledge workers the means to drive case outcomes more efficiently and more specifically according to established business metrics.

All that said, the value proposition for BPM still remains clear. The need for organizations to focus on process optimization and efficiencies as well as the needs of knowledge and case workers has never been more apparent. In a recent report, industry analysts Craig Le Clair and Connie Moore from Forrester Research discuss the needs and benefits of case management, and describe how organizations’ requirements for process management are evolving and organizations are struggling with the changing nature of knowledge work. Read the Forrester Research Report, ”Dynamic Case Management — An Old Idea Catches New Fire.”

Advanced case management recognizes the distinct benefits of BPM for optimizing case outcomes, and interleaves these capabilities in such a way as to provide a speedy return to business managers as well as flexible, yet easy to implement and manage, capabilities for information technology professionals. Thus, it is clear that advanced case management and business process management are better together, and with the seamless integration of other key capabilities, can deliver significant business benefits.

By David Yockelson, Rye Brook, New York. David is Program Director of Product Marketing for ACM/BPM in IBM Software Group.