Adaptive Case Management Explained

Over the next four weeks, we are sitting down with Caseblocks CEO, Paul McGlynn to ask him about the future of Business Process Management. This week we are discussing Adaptive Case Management’s ability to transform customer experience.

Why is Adaptive Case Management the new buzz word in customer experience technologies?

 

Well, ACM has been around for a while. In fact, we won our first industry award as an Adaptive Case Management platform from the Workflow Management Coalition back in 2013, with our first Caseblocks implementation.

Five years on and the analysts and consultants have seen enough of case management in action to recognise the benefits of a system designed to evolve and change.

If you’re forcing me for a one sentence answer… Adaptive case management is trending in its many forms (dynamic case management being another term) because it evolves with the business user and the ever changing requirements of organisations responding to their environment; competition, the internet of things, cloud, proliferation of social platforms and mobile to name but a few.

What piques the analysts’ interest in particular is the dynamism offered by case management platforms now that IT is moving towards a supporting role. Twenty years ago when we were putting in enterprise solutions we were first of all training end-users how to use a mouse. Now end-users have programming skills. This is a huge change to how you engage the modern organisation.

Case management is far from a rigid set of rules and processes intended to guide business users. It takes into account both routine and ad-hoc tasks.

It creates a dynamic loop of learning that empowers knowledge workers to improve customer experience by improving the organisation’s operational response

Simply put, ACM supports business users as new processes emerge around them, from the market, from new opportunities, from changing legislation and from internal innovation. ACM supports incremental change, and this is attractive because it can de-risk change when the only other alternative is wholesale, big-bang transformation.

What is your definition of an Adaptive Case Management solution?

In the context of Business Process Automation, Adaptive Case Management solutions are applications that support complex processes within an organisation.

These processes are wide ranging and require both knowledge workers and a number of digital workflows within various departments. In simple language, case management helps the organisation model and handle different types of work across teams and departments.

Case management and the case worker emerged from medical, legal and social domains, and systems emerged to support those deep experts in diagnosing medical illness, solving a legal matters or in the case of social welfare, looking after citizens with multiple needs from the state. Early case management systems emerged largely as information repositories where all of the decision making was taking place outside the system, and in the hands of the knowledge worker.

The DNA of those case management systems was about handling any scenario thrown at them, and that starts to become attractive to modern organisations where customers can be unpredictable and demanding.

So a more modern case management system has to retain those principles of flexibility at the moment of need, while satisfying the reasonable demands of organisations who want to automate routine work.