We introduce in this blog series the concept of Case Management Process Modeling (CMPM) - An emerging concept complementary to existing Business Process Management (BPM) concepts. My previous blog entries dealt with the Case Management Process Modeling (CMPM) – An Introduction and Case Management Process Modeling (CMPM) – What Constitutes a Case? of case management. In this third blog entry, we explain concepts for case management systems. Furthermore, we explore the inter-organizational dimension of the case management paradigm. We do not refer to any specific system, but describe potential system components. They can be relevant in the future, but it is not guaranteed that they will be available in any product. This blog entry is relevant for enterprise architects, product managers, researchers and developers.
Motivation
BPM or workflow systems exist since over three decades in research and industry. Although still evolving, we have a good understanding on how to design and implement them. We briefly present here the requirements and solutions for case management systems, where we can leverage existing BPM capabilities, but also need to build up on new technology.
User Interfaces
An often overlooked, but very important aspect of case management is the User Interface (UI). I wrote in joern.franke/blog that case management is about dynamically evolving processes centered around business assets. This implies a high collaboration between case workers that need to creatively work with processes involving data from various sources. Thus, they need to link dynamically applications and data to work on cases. Traditional UI technologies do not support this very well. New open web-based technologies and standards address this issue. I identified the following relevant standards for case management:
Some of these standards are currently under development. However, case management requires open standards that support the case workers to do the case work in a flexible and creative way. If it is not based on open standards then case workers cannot share their work with others. Furthermore, tool support for these standards seems to improve rapidly.
UI technology is the interface to case management systems that provide the functionality as well as processing capabilities for managing cases.
Case Management Systems
A case management system needs to support dynamic evolving processes (e.g. [3]), rule engines and integration of various application systems and data sources. Case management systems can contain the following components:
Inter-organizational Case Management Systems
In times of globalization, different organizations need to work together. In order to work together, they need to be able to share parts of a case with other organizations. Clearly, they won’t share everything due to privacy, regulatory or strategic reasons. This means also that selected case content (e.g. data, documents, rules or activities) is replicated in different systems of different organizations. The replication process can be governed by policies, but needs to take into the account the particularities of distributed systems. Furthermore, a replicated object may exist in different case contexts. For example, a business asset “Invoice” exists in the case context of a “supplier” and a “manufactures”, but is subject to different rules or activities. This requires new case management engines to deal with replicated evolving processes (cf. [3]) and data. We illustrate this in the following figure.
This is not only a technical challenge, but also a business challenge [4]. People from different organizations need to collaborate on a case. This requires training, but also appropriate means to bring them on the same page (e.g. common workshops). Clear governance processes as well as accountability and responsibility for various aspects need to be defined, such as risks, data, systems and processes. Furthermore, a case library can help people to understand each other’s processes. The lessons learnt in the field of Enterprise Architecture will be very useful to establish successful case management systems.
Conclusion
We presented in this blog entry inter-organizational system concepts for case management. On the UI level, we can leverage existing open web technologies. On the system level, we can leverage existing integration technologies. A case management system should support further real-time collaboration capabilities. The case management library is an important component for improving and securing comparative advantages by leveraging internal and external sources for organizational learning. However, new execution engines need to be developed to support case management. Finally, we explained that there are technical challenges (e.g. replication of case data in the systems of different organizations) as well as business challenges (e.g. governance) on the inter-organizational level, where different organizations work on some aspects of a case together.
What is next?
In the next blog entry, I will describe research challenges for case management. This is relevant for researchers, solution architects and developers.
Acknowledgements
This work results from the collaboration between SAP Research and the SCORE group at LORIA-INRIA-CNRS of the Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France.
Disclaimer
Please note that we only describe potential system functionality that may be relevant in the future - these functionalities may never be implemented or available.
References/Further Reading
[1] Olding, E. & Rozwell, C., Expand Your BPM Horizons by Exploring Unstructured Processes, G00172387, Gartner, 2009
[2] K. Bhattacharya, N. S. Caswell, S. Kumaran, A. Nigam, and F.Y. Wu. "Artifact-centered operational modeling: Lessons from customer engagements." IBM Systems Journal, 46(4):703- 721, 2007
[3] Franke, Jörn: Coordination of Distributed Activities in Dynamic Situations. The Case of Inter-organizational Crisis Management, PhD Thesis (Computer Science), to be published, LORIA-INRIA-CNRS, Université de Nancy/Université Henri Poincaré, France, 2011.
[4] Forrester/IBM: The Next Generation of Knowledge Workers Processes Will Dominate Enterprises, October 2010.