BPM and Adaptive Case Management their one and the same I’m afraid…

I feel like I need to rant, and I have been feeling this way for quite while, infact, ever since we started talking about Dynamic Case Management (DCM) or Adaptive Case Management (ACM) or  whatever 3 letter acronym you like to call it, came on the scene. 

The reason for my acute irritation is the pious articles proclaiming this new paradigm in resolving  this hither too unknown work pattern. My contention is that Case Management, DCM or ACM is not new, it is completely within the definition of Case Management, I’ll concede that it has some specific characteristics that can be distinguished form traditional Case Management but in my view these are semantics and reflect the improved capabilities of BPM solutions to manage an ever broader range of work types that have always existed.

I wasn’t going to write this blog because I knew I’d become emotional however, after reading Bruce Silver’s piece on BPM and ACM earlier today, I just started blogging.  Bruce starts off by setting the stage “ can a BPMS do a good job with case management, or do you need a special tool”. He then goes into a discussion of BPMN.  How the latter relates to end user I’ll never, know, in the last five years of implementing BPM solutions none of my customers has ever begged me to use BPMN. Many have asked if it is necessary or a good standard to which I have replied, standards are always good but as long as you have a simple and agreed modelling notation that the project team agree on them really it doesn’t matter too much.

My real bone of contention however, is that case management has always been the sweet spot for both workflow and case management solutions.   Filenet, Documentum and Staffware made millions from implementing solutions for insurance companies that allowed them to program quite rigid processes into workflow solutions providing better control and visibility.   BPM tools with their improved integration and model driven architectures allowed simpler, richer and faster process design, providing real time reporting.  These solutions  raised the game for process automation causing the insurance companies who had previously invested in workflow solutions to quickly adopt the new BPM paradigm. 

There was never any question, in the mind of customers, that what the new BPM solution provided was improved Case Management.   It’s only when the pundit’s and no doubt the BPM vendors came along with new capabilities to sell, that we began to muddy the waters with definitions of Case management or more specifically ACM and DCM, that meant that you could now handle so called unstructured processes, allowing knowledge workers to change their processes on the fly, to route work to a new role or create a new activity not previously defined in the process.

For me processes have always lived on a spectrum from unstructured email conversations to highly structured insurance claims handling.  A good example of unstructured processes are incidents, like an oil spill, or a call centre agent receiving calls about a faulty car where the brakes fail inexplicably for no reason. There is no prescribed process and the knowledge workers in these situations must figure how to resolve the issue, usually by discussion amongst a team of individuals who derive a policy with guidelines and a set of rules.   The resulting process emerges through the interaction and collaboration.  This process may never be documented, for example where the likelihood of the incident occurring a gain is so remote that it doesn’t warrant being codified in a programmatic solution.

Another example of unstructured processes are where the knowledge worker seeks to resolve an out of boundary condition, i.e. although it is an insurance claim the existing rules don’t specify what to do for this condition, or the knowledge worker may want to treat this high spending customer definitely to retain their business, but the rules don’t allow it.  In order to resolve the case the knowledge worker must use their discretion, often by consulting with managers or if authorised using their own initiative, to determine what the appropriate course of action should be. In effect create an exception process on the fly.   In this latter example the process may be codified and written into policy such that all customers meeting this criteria can be treated in a similar manner.

Real adaptive case management allows for this exception handling to be codified on the fly, so rather than resorting to email outside of the process to agree the change. The knowledge worker can create the steps that route the work to the relevant individual or alternatively create a new  rule or even a data item to record the new decision type, rather than just record the action in the “notes”. 

The fact that current BPM solutions can  allow you to manage these latter scenarios, is proof positive that this is just an extension of case, the new steps can be included as an “alternate flow”.  What I haven’t heard from any quarter is that you cannot use a BPMS to handle these ad hoc situations. In fact most vendors are falling over themselves to explain how elegantly they can handle these new use cases in the latest version of their solutions. 

And this is why I get so angry, because we are talking about processes, cases that either need to be captured as a  one off or need to provide the user the ability to refine the process on the fly however, in both scenarios we are still talking about a case. When the knowledge worker must create new activities, policies or rules within a process this is just an extension of platform capability, completely within the bounds of the latest BPM solutions. 

So just for the record, processes of whatever type; ad hoc, structured or unstructured have always been with us, BPM and workflow solutions have always been able to manage them. Traditionally this was only in limited ways, by codifying them when the rules and activities became stable agreed policies and procedures.

In today’s world BPM solutions can handle more dynamic processes, by allowing knowledge workers, where authorised,  to create new activities (policy and procedure), on the fly at run time.   They are doing this with the same BPM, all be it enhanced, solutions that provide essentially the  same core functionality, model driven development of processes, rules , SLA’s and Ui’s all without recourse to writing  code.  Yes the functionality has been extended somewhat, the complexity hidden away so that users can create more robust and compliant solutions more easily.   They are still cases and that are still managed. Right I feel better now that I’ve got that off my chest, back to strictly come dancing!