Dynamic Case Management
The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker.
PETER DRUCKER — MANAGEMENT CHALLENGES FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
In his groundbreaking book on management, “Management Challenges for the 21st Century,” Peter Drucker illustrated that in the 20th century it was the extraordinary increase in productivity by manual laborers that enabled the previously unprecedented increase in the standard of living enjoyed throughout the 1900s. For the 21st century, he argued, it is the productivity of the knowledge worker that would define both the core mission for managers and the source of economic growth. Today, more than a half-century after Drucker first coined the phrase “knowledge worker” (in 1959) the share of the workforce represented by this group has grown considerably, to as much as half of all workers by some measures. So too have grown investments targeting knowledge worker productivity. Yet despite this, we remain far from realizing the level of improvement seen in manual labor over the course of the last century.
These knowledge worker targeted investments have largely revolved around Information Technology (IT) systems and have traditionally targeted one of two areas. The first involves control and automation systems, involving software such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or the more contemporary technology of Business Process Management (BPM). These systems are designed to enforce a command and control management model to ensuring consistent work, adherence to policy and regulation, and generally repeatable, predictable modes of work. Where efficiency gains are realized, it is through standardizing how work is performed.
Yet without the flexibility to adapt to changes in the business environment, the potential impact of work automation offered for knowledge worker productivity is limited. Much (if not most) of the knowledge worker’s daily activities cannot be accurately defined in advance, within pre-defined automation units. At least not with the level of structure and precision necessary to code activities into transactional environments designed for control rather than flexibility. Knowledge work is by its nature more complex, dynamic and unpredictable in nature.
As a result many of the most pivotal activities which fill the knowledge worker’s day take place outside the realm of particular applications, other than the basic ad hoc tools of email, SharePoint, and other components of ironically named “productivity suites” which offer very little with regards to specifically facilitating productivity improvement.
In fact, the transactional environments that make up much of previously cited investments (such as ERP and BPM) may actually curtail the knowledge worker’s effectiveness, by placing procedural limits and restrictions where none need to exist and contributing to frustration levels and knowledge worker attrition. It is in part due to these limitations that Drucker was a long-time skeptic of the potential for IT to sufficiently address knowledge worker productivity. Yet Drucker was not opposed to collaboration, per se, but rather to the command-and-control orientation of transactional environments. As he often posited (and to quote specifically one of his Harvard Business Review op-eds) “The modern organization cannot be an organization of boss and subordinate. It must be organized as a team.”
Those words go directly to the notion of top-down management via predefined, structured process automation. Effective and efficient knowledge work relies on the smooth navigation of unstructured processes and the elaboration of custom and one-off procedures. As we move to the 21st century business model, the focus must be on equipping knowledge workers with tools and infrastructure that enable communication and information sharing, such as networking, e-mail, content management and increasingly, social media. Yet supporting the inherently dynamic nature of knowledge work does not mean abandoning all aspects of governance and information management.
Bridging the Gap Between Controlled and Ad Hoc
As these ‘traditional’ IT investments have advanced their footprint in the workplace, a gap has emerged. It can be found between e-mail and ad hoc communication tools (which, while used in one form or another by all knowledge workers, offer little with regard to task management) and the ERP/BPM realm, premised on predictable work patterns defined in advance. What has emerged to fill this void is Adaptive or Dynamic Case Management — solutions with capabilities that recognize the perpetual evolution that will characterize particular business processes and provide powerful support to those who must work within these environments.
For the last several years, people have studied knowledge worker productivity and work patterns. Part of this research has involved the analysis of how an average knowledge worker spends their day. We asked knowledge workers to identify the percentage of their day spent in various work modes ranging from fully automated to entirely ad hoc. With results shown on the next page, two studies conducted first in 2011 then followed up again in 2013 found that little had changed in that time.
Notably, only a third of knowledge workers’ time is spent in structured work that can be or already has been automated through traditional IT investments. Of course there is in part an easy explanation for why so little is reported spent on fully automated — if it’s automated, then little time is invested in performing it. Yet the larger issue here is that not just that a small percent of the day spent on automated activities, but that only an insignificant portion of a knowledge worker’s activities are even automatable. That which can be automated by and large already has been. While there remain opportunities for alleviating the burden of repetitive, “drudgework” by incorporating automatable work into the course of knowledge work, the bulk of the low hanging fruit of automation has largely been addressed.
Where knowledge workers do spend most of their time (2/3 of their day as shown below) is at the nexus of both purely unpredictable work, where nothing ever happens the same way twice, the realm of barely repeatable processes, where work follows a pattern, but not a scripted pathway. This is in contrast with traditional structured workflow, which may be complex in its definition, yet is comparatively much more narrowly focused, by virtue of the fact that it is entirely predefined. Whereas Dynamic Case Management (as a means of facilitating knowledge work) involves specifically defined goals and milestones, inevitably the sequence to realize these changes varies from day-to-day. This spotlights the critical difference between Business Process Management (BPM) and workflow automation from Dynamic Case Management, where both structured work and structured processes combine across the lifecycle of a business process.
Work Patterns of Knowledge Workers; Percent of the Day Spent in Different Modes
Barely repeatable processes are representative of the inherent complexity that defines knowledge work, where goals are consistent and well-established, yet the pathways to achieve them are numerous with different variations and different decision points. Often with these types of processes it is possible to define and apply policies and specific business logic around how that work is performed. This will often require the ability to define and manage specific sets of business rules, as well as high level patterns of how the process is going to flow (e.g., “milestones”) yet have it still be impossible to determine in advance the exact sequence of tasks and activities. In each case, the exact combination and sequence of activities is determined by the unique circumstances of a given case.
Why Managing Knowledge Work Is Harder
The difference between the manual work that was the subject of the pre-Drucker theorists such as W. Edwards Deming and Frederick Taylor and knowledge work we face today, is the abundance highly-predictable production processes. Manual work readily lends itself to standardization and the application of statistical optimization. Quality control and efficiency in this context comes from performing the same task the same way, not finding creative ways to reach the same outcome.
Investments in packaged software such as ERP, or more domain-specific applications such as those for loan origination, are predicated on adopting the specific vendor’s view of how the process should be and would be performed. In fact that was their selling point — the vendor having spent a lot of time and their own R&D investment to pre-define the process. The expectation was and is that the purchaser or adopter will change their operations according to the new process(es) contained within the application. Although BPM has offered a great leap forward in enabling the shift from vendor-defined to client-defined processes, allowing business analysts to define processes unique to the business, these advantages remain limited to the roughly one-third of work that the knowledge workers reported as being predictable, yet still fails to address the majority of their workday.
Yet contrast this with Dynamic Case Management, which allows retaining consistency where it is useful to do so, but brings a broader focus on events and outcomes and thereby offers support to knowledge workers in the less predictable and predefined areas of their roles. The lifecycle of a case begins when an event occurs, and as a result a case file is opened, then at that stage perhaps all that is known is the end point — the criteria that defines the resolution of the case.
Dynamic Case Management is Event-Driven, Content- and Context-Aware
As the case progresses, a series of activities will occur and information is generated and/or otherwise added to the case. It is that information and the context around it that determines the path(s) to be taken, and ultimately define the achieved outcome. It is only when that end goal is reached that the case is completed. For example, when a customer reports a problem, a case is opened and what happens next is the movement toward realizing and resolving the case, but each step is only determined as the previous one is completed, not as part of a predefined sequence.
In this instance an issue is investigated. It may be something that takes months to resolve or it could take hours. Along the way, potential solutions are attempted or suggested, there is communication by voice, email, or postal mail, and inevitably research is conducted. There may be any number of sub-processes or steps kicked off as the case evolves, but the sequence for those activities, how the work is performed and how it flows, is deliberately not determined in advance.
As is the case for knowledge work itself, the pattern of work supported by Dynamic Case Management that which is goal-driven yet inherently nonlinear. The route to resolution of the case evolves over time, depends on circumstances and feedback in response to previous case activity and may (and often will) go off in unpredictable directions and without a regularized time sequence. Thus the lifecycle of the case is inherently non-deterministic, where the pathway for reaching the outcome is determined by each stage, each milestone in the management of that case. The state of the case is determined by the content and the context within it, not by where it fits on a particular flow chart or process map.
With Dynamic Case Management Goals Are Predetermined, Sequence and Pathways Are Not
CASE MANAGEMENT PROCESSES ARE GOAL-DRIVEN AND NON-DETERMINISTIC, THE END POINT IS KNOWN AT THE START, THE PATHWAY FOR REACHING IT IS DETERMINED BY THE OUTCOME AT EACH STAGE AS WELL AS RULES AND POLICIES APPLICABLE TO THE CASE. THE STATE OF THE CASE IS DETERMINED BY THE CONTENT AND CONTEXT WITHIN THE CASE, NOT WHERE THE CASE IS AT ANY TIME.
Getting to the Root Cause of Productivity Loss
As part of the research repeated in 2011 and 2013, we asked about the hurdles and pain points that knowledge workers face relative to their productivity — i.e., what did they face in the course of their workday which caused them to be less productive than they could otherwise be. Here again we found notable consistency between studies, and most curious is that it is not the knowledgedependent activities that would otherwise be impossible to automate. Rather, the greatest productivity traps are found in the more mundane activities, simply tracking who is doing what, where they have dependencies on co-workers, where are they in the course of their work, what’s the state of their work, and how are they managing the documentation that they need to support a given task. These are the things that knowledge workers find the most challenging.
Daily Challenges Knowledge Workers Face
These findings reinforces the fact that knowledge workers do not need to be told what to, but rather require tools that give them visibility into operations, access to information, and assistance with enabling collaboration. Here we see great alignment between the benefits offered with Dynamic Case Management and the capabilities needed for knowledge worker productivity. A prime example of the need for a more flexible investment is the rising trend for remote/field workers. Enabled by the latest mobile hardware (smartphones, tablets, iPads, etc.) remote knowledge workers are more connected than ever — the only limiting factor has been the software to allow them to fully utilize the connective and collaborative possibilities of modern technology. Dynamic Case Management is the latest evolution and is filling that gap.
Identifying Dynamic Case Management Work Patterns
Not every organization has specific staff, roles, or departments explicitly identified by name or title as performing “Case Management.” This has traditionally been limited to certain industries and company types, such as insurance carriers, healthcare providers, other services delivery providers, government agencies, and so forth. Five years ago, or even more recently, if you asked an executive at an organization outside of that traditional group whether or not they needed case management, chances are their response would be “We’re not managing cases. So, no, we don’t.”
Yet it is interesting to see that nearly every organization that was surveyed now identifies work patterns directly applicable to case management — and across all of these case management type patterns there is growth in either applicability or recognition over the last two years. Indeed it maybe more of the latter, greater recognition rather than actual changes in work patterns from 2011 to 2013.
Work Patterns Applicable to Case Management
The reality is these patterns are applicable. The work patterns, the use cases, the aspect of knowledge work for which dynamic case management is needed, these are applicable to virtually every organization. We expect case management to be a market that’s going to grow quite a bit and be central to this notion of how we actually start to realize knowledge worker productivity. Through their various reports Forrester Research has identified three central types of work that fit the Dynamic Case Management model: Investigative, Service Request, and Incident Management, circled in red in the chart above. Forrester’s categorizations are generally validated by this research, with their three main categories representing a superset of the top six case management work patterns identified in both the 2011 and 2013 surveys.
This three-part segmentation presents a useful framework to see the interplay between the functionality and sub-processes and use cases that you would see in each of those three categories, as well as the drivers there. For example, customer experience is probably one that you could say overlaps with incident management and service request, probably less relevant to investigations; risk management being a critical aspect of investigations as well as service request and so forth.
In the table below, and on the next few pages that follow, we have expanded on the Forrester model with our own definitions, examples, and research-backed observations.
Dynamic Case Management Categories and Examples
Investigative
Investigative bodies deal with requests for information or otherwise the need to complete a specific dossier for a particular case. These goaldriven scenarios are typically very dynamic and unpredictable in nature.
One of the critical factors with Investigative Case Management is the ability to delegate tasks to other investigators, and be able to synchronize the results within the case folder. For example, the gathering and processing of evidence in a criminal investigation.
Examples:
Regulatory Queries, IT Governance, Audit Requests, Mergers and Acquisitions, eDiscovery
Applicable Industries:
Government, Legal, Law Enforcement, Regulated Industries such as Banking, Healthcare, Pharmaceutical
Service Request
Service delivery requires the balance of control and facilitation to ensure both consistency and efficiency. It ultimately requires the ability to apply criteria and parameters while making constant coursecorrections through the delivery lifecycle.
Different from Investigative Case Management, managing Service Requests is less likely to involve parallel activities, but will almost certainly involve multiple roles and hands-offs, and the ability to maintain continuity of the case between hands-offs is critical.
Examples:
Benefits Administration, Customer Service, Claims Processing, Loan Originations, Underwriting
Applicable Industries:
Insurance, Banking, Healthcare, IT Services, Contact Centers, other customer-facing firms
Incident Management
Incidents such as accidents or complaints are unpredictable in both the defining details and resulting ramifications. For this reason, applying a flexible and dynamic case approach can greatly assist in the successful resolution of incidents.
Similar to Investigative Case Management, the ability to maintain and demonstrate the “chain of custody” of information gathered during or other used in the course of incident resolution is a critical aspect of Dynamic Case Management is used for Incident Management
Examples:
Complaint Management, Dispute Resolution, Quality Management, Adverse Event Reporting, Medical Records
Applicable Industries:
Government and Regulators, Regulated Industries such as Banking, Healthcare, Medical Devices, Pharmaceutical
We have asked organizations to describe work patterns, priorities, and challenges, and in doing so gained more context, getting to the definitions behind these terms and validating which work patterns are applicable to their organizations. One aspect that is a bit outside of the Forrester segmentation, however, but is nonetheless something we’ve seen quite a bit in our own work is the pattern for Work Planning and Assignment Management. In fairness, it could fit in all or one of the three, depending on the context, the type of capabilities and functionality involved. Although it may be closest to Service Request Management, particularly as it relates to service delivery.
Where the profiles of staff involved (knowledge workers) revolve around service roles or customer support type roles, then service request assignment management tends to be part of Service Request Management, particularly where it augments (or increasingly is replacing) the common Workforce Optimization (WFO) applications used in service industries. If the functions of planning and assigning staff revolve around fieldwork that is not part of service delivery, then in our experience it is most likely around an investigative process.
Incident Management
Incident Management deals with supporting processes where things need to be handled in a particular way, but not in a way that can be fully automated. It’s applying policy, rules, tracking, being able to have an audit trail in place, being able to have consistency and traceability and visibility into how work is performed, but not overly prescriptive in every aspect of it. This may involve standard processes such as the creation, formatting, and development of documents or other areas, but it’s not something for which you can apply a fully-automated process. In that case, you have a work pattern that follows a case management type lifecycle, but it’s less about the subjectivity or the knowledge worker. In other words, it’s less about enabling the knowledge worker to apply their own judgment and know-how to it. It’s more about allowing dynamic processes to be performed according to prescribed policies and procedures.
Not every aspect of incident management falls into that category. What is common is requiring multi-channel interaction across multiple devices, being able to support cloud and mobile access, having fine-grained tracking and reporting around how information is captured and used, what rules are applied and how decisions are made. Typically, this is something that’s event-driven rather than discovery-oriented, such is otherwise true with Investigative Case Management.
For the last two years the lack of visibility in others’ work has been the top challenge faced by knowledge workers (see “Daily Challenges Knowledge Workers Face” on page 6). This is certainly true for incident management, as the ability expedite a resolution requires visibility into the status of dependent activities being performed by others.
Lastly, the notion of better records and data management practices. This is a critical issue in every organization and something that case management deals with very directly and in a very meaningful way by being able to apply context to existing content going into a system of record, and governance or structure to content that’s coming out of or being produced as a result of engagement — interactions through systems of engagement.
Service Requests
Services requests and Service Request Management are inherently event-driven, whether it’s a help desk scenario where a service request call is coming in or logged. The same would apply to customer onboarding or even employee onboarding. In each case, the exact steps and the sequence to be followed are going to be defined based on the unique aspect of the case, incident, or event. Inevitably this will involve a set of milestones, a checklist, rules and policies. In different cases, there might be regulatory requirements. There’s certainly tracking of it. And in every case, you want to do it as quickly as possible, but without compromising the quality of the outcome and experience. This is one of the distinctions between case management to a service request scenario versus CRM or other tools that have traditionally been applied to the same basic business problems.
We’ve all been on the phone with a customer support rep and known that they’re trying to get through the call as quickly as possible. Part of that is good. You want them to be expeditious. But they’re moving very quickly. Largely that’s because the metric applied there is not necessarily your satisfaction, but the time to resolution and being able to close that ticket as fast as possible. Very often, that works against the benefit to the customer, employee, or stakeholder involved.
With case management, it is following a goal-driven path where the goal is known when that ticket is open, the goal is to close that ticket. But the metrics applied aren’t necessarily and don’t need to be limited to just the time to resolution. It can be applied to other aspects such as enhancing the quality of experience and the ability to bring in the combination of access to information from external systems, the ease of facilitating collaboration, bringing in other subject matter experts or others that are going to collaborate on that resolution, being able to have an accurate log of what steps are taken to have that adaptive capability where the next step is just based on the context using analytics, using past service resolutions; being able to bring all that to bear to not only resolve the incident quickly, but to do so in a way that optimizes the experience. That’s a benefit of case management versus CRM.
Investigative Case Management
Investigative case management is the one that showed up consistently in both surveys as being the least applicable, yet in reality, as you deconstruct both what’s involved with investigative case management and how that might be applied in organizations, it’s something that is very broadly applicable.
There are some obvious aspects of it, such as where it’s being used in a criminal investigation, in a fraud investigation, in an audit scenario. In all these cases, it’s goal-driven and it has a definitive lifecycle. It’s event-driven, but it may be something that is initiated. In other words, it may be used as a discovery process looking for events as opposed to simply starting once identified fraud or something else that has occurred.
It’s most definitely not production case management. You can talk to anybody that’s involved in any aspect of investigation or any kind of judicative process. They are experts and their expertise is what guides that process. Yet, it still needs to follow prescribed procedures and policies the way that information is handled, whether it’s specifically the chain of custody or more mundane aspects that one piece of information might trigger five other pieces of information that need to be collected.
A frequent cited and thus critical requirement for Investigative Case Management is the ability to delegate for different investigators to follow up on different pieces of information, and then that needs to be consolidated and synchronized. There may be handoffs of the case — in fact, there almost always are — and being able to maintain consistency and continuity with those handoffs. All of that is critical, as is the cloud aspect, the mobile aspect. None of this stuff is happening today with one individual sitting in front of a PC completely tethered. This is stuff that’s highly collaborative, very field-oriented, and something where case management is absolutely key.
Those are the clear cases, but there are many other cases around. Even things such as new product development, new drug development — discovery-oriented processes where you want to be capturing that information. New drug development is frankly a fascinating application of case management. It’s a field that we’ve been involved with for more than ten years and have seen the obvious parallels with dynamic case management.
It’s frankly not an area where case management has largely been applied so far. They don’t think of themselves as having case management type problems. They have discovery-oriented problems and innovation-oriented problems. But this is why dynamic case management is so applicable to these areas. It’s not just what was traditionally deemed case work in the old model of things.
The other aspect, particularly with investigative and discovery-oriented case management and applications and use cases, is that it’s very data-driven. However, we tend to take exception to this notion of being data-driven. It’s the term that is in today’s vernacular that we use to describe things for which information is informing how work is to be done, and the pursuit of that information really defines that work. Thus it is knowledge-driven. Ultimately, it’s the context of that information that drives the process and the ability to enable that by applying analytics in a closed loop scenario is a critical aspect and a critical benefit of dynamic case management, as we distinguish dynamic and adaptive case management from the other kinds of case management — things that might be described as case management but are falling into the other realm of CRM or content management.
That dividing line is around how you can create those closed-loop environments and scenarios in which you are able to extract analytics around information and context as it’s being captured, feed that back in a way that’s actionable, and allow for knowledge workers to be able to make better decisions based on the analytics. Not to prescribe exactly what they need to do, as in the case of production case management, but enable them to make better-informed decisions based on analytics. That’s a critical benefit of dynamic case management.
Building Responsive Systems
In many ways, the emergence of Dynamic Case Management represents the paradigm shift from adapting business practices to the design of IT systems, to building systems that reflect how work is actually performed. Our work today is untethered. The tools supporting it may not be. Having access on smartphones and iPads is critical. Being able to have access to that information while traveling is critical. Having flexibility of those environments is critical. When we look at the patterns of how knowledge workers spend their day, we need to think in terms of whether or not it is structured activity, such as completing within a transactional application (and we already know that is a very small part of their day) Or if an unstructured activity, is it purely ad hoc? Chance there is there some definition to it, and that it is dynamic in nature.
Look at the priorities that are in place today that are addressable by case management. In other words, don’t start by asking what benefits of case management apply to you. Rather, identify the things that are priorities in you organization, then identify the link to those which happen to be applicable to case management. For example, reducing training requirements and change management otherwise associated with the introduction of new processes, policy/procedure, systems — these are matters that can be greatly improved (or otherwise prevented) by leveraging Dynamic Case Management. In our survey research, we have seen consistent interest in the pursuit of these productivity-oriented improvements (e.g., distinct from specific financial gains) and “soft dollar” benefits around reducing rework, increasing customer satisfaction, increasing employee satisfaction, gaining visibility into operations.
What we’re starting to talk about is IT in terms of Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement. Systems of record are transactional systems, ERP, HR, database, structured systems. Systems of engagement, as the name applies, are how individuals, stakeholders, employees, and customers are engaging (e-mail, customer-facing aspect of a CRM, increasingly web apps and mobile apps).
Unsurprisingly for knowledge work, this dividing line is not a definitive demarcation. It’s more a fuzzy line between systems and engagement and systems record as it applies here. Generally, we can say that this highly-structured automated work is indicative of the systems of record whereas work that is more dynamic, more ad hoc, that has definition and rules but is not structured, is in the province of systems of engagement.
The reason today there is so much discussion about about case management in the context of knowledge work is case management provides a framework that is both a system of record and a system of engagement. The case folder provides connections to rules, policies, process, as well as the systems of record. The case management system provides for multiple channels of interaction, collecting multiple types of information whether it’s a traditional document, a scanned image document, report, e-mail, voicemail. All that becomes a critical part of the case record.
Traditionally, that’s out of reach for one or the other — i.e., either the system of record has no visibility or the only connection point to the system of engagement is the user. Ultimately it is still hard to use systems of record in the mobile, dynamic way we now frequently work, and it’s hard to apply governance to systems of engagement. Bridging that is one of the core values of Dynamic Case Management, through a shared object model that enables incorporating both structured and unstructured information into the case, and with that the ability apply governance.
As described earlier, research has consistently shown that knowledge workers spend at least two-thirds of any given day in activities which do not follow a predetermined path and which are unpredictable in nature, but still geared toward specific goals. Dynamic Case Management’s adaptive nature assists the knowledge worker to apply know-how and make decisions that lead to the achievement of these identified goals. Better records and data management by connecting context and outcomes with actual information is at the heart of Dynamic Case Management’s effectiveness.
The ability to identify cases, to be able to access information based on the case, based on the context of what occurred, as well as to manage information so the different files can be cross referenced and linked between cases, ultimately allows for capturing and managing the context and the knowhow from the activities associated with that case. With Dynamic Case Management a given case may live on in perpetuity, retaining its last state until another event occurs to re-launch it; or it can also be used to launch another case. For example, with a customer resolution scenario, it may be that a particular customer issue now has become a best practice for other issues, related issues, or other occurrences of that issue and that case can then be the template for how similar situations will be solved going forward. In that sense, the original case’s record becomes part of the wider system of record, continuing to influence and guide (but not decide) the knowledge workers’ decisions.
Dynamic Case Management Enables a System of Engagement and a System of Record (SOR) For All Forms of Content
Dynamic Case Management provides the ability not only to pull that in as part of the case record, but also to be a platform for enabling mash-ups and to support work in the chosen environment. Similarly, extending the transactional management of traditional BPM with the adaptable goaldriven benefits, provides the capacity for delivering work and managing that work.
Dynamic Case Management does not predefine whether this work is virtual or physical but pulls together all the end points, information and environments, providing a long-term record of how work is done, as well as the guidance, rules, visibility and input that allow knowledge workers to be more productive. Dynamic Case Management as a system of record contains “what happened.” Including email, voicemail, traditional documents, GIS documents, video and so on, the Dynamic Case Management system pulls it all together in a virtual folder to have one version of the truth, ultimately providing the permanent record of that case.
Dynamic Case Management fundamentally differs from tools such as BPM and ECM because it is not simply a system of parallel silos, but rather a superset or master system of record, capturing both the “what” (data, files, records or, most often, links to the physical sources of those) and the “how” (metadata, audit trail, as well as the context of decisions and actions). As a result, adaptive Dynamic Case Management facilitates more productive knowledge work through the ability to identify and organize content distinctly from other cases — whether shared or unique, it is connected to the specific business context in which it was used.
In this way, Dynamic Case Management even when it is connected with other information management systems and functions still provides a transactional thread across multiple systems of record. The direction for Dynamic Case Management allows the work to follow the worker, providing the cohesiveness of a single point of access. Dynamic Case Management does not impose whether this work is virtual or physical but pulls together all the end points, information, environments and provides the long-term record of how work is done, as well as the guidance, rules, visibility and input that allow knowledge workers to be more productive.
Conclusion
Dynamic Case Management allows productivity improvements to be measured in both financial and non-financial terms, including reduced re-work, improved customer, and employee satisfaction. In part, by bringing areas of work previously “under the radar” when performed in purely ad hoc environments into greater visibility, Dynamic Case Management offers the ability to prioritize activities across multiple cases, balancing workloads, as well as monitoring quality, timeliness and speed.
There is a broad and collaborative synthesis of case data that is at the heart of what makes Dynamic Case Management “dynamic” and is also the basic driver for why it needs to be so. Dynamic Case Management is ultimately about allowing knowledge workers to work the way that they want to work and to provide them with the tools and information they need to do so effectively. Increasingly, this means having access to social media and outside information sources. There is a significant amount of work currently conducted through LinkedIn, Twitter and other social sources as well as resources selected by individual workers that create input and contextual information. It’s a critical part of the case record, but is not part of any centrally-managed IT infrastructure.
Critical benefits, and fundamental unique include factors should as delivering a shared object model for both structured and unstructured data, so that content from any number of sources can be incorporated not only within the case folder, but the case context as well.
By having a comprehensive context around the case folder, rather than simply a “blind” container of files and data, allows for goal-based outcomes, defining targets and milestones using the combination of business rules, data, content and analytics. Ultimately this enables actionable analytics seeing meaningful information and context, in a cohesive environment where action can be taken. Dynamic Case Management offers the ability to have analytics around that work, around the content and the context of the case, and to have that be in an actionable framework where you’re able to see the result of interactions and actually make decisions in real-time.
Further, and this notion reinforces the fact that cloud-based delivery is a must, Dynamic Case Management enables field-based activities by providing access to mobile devices, participating in from any device, anywhere — delivering work to where and how the work is done today. Rather than creating yet another island of automation, Dynamic Case Management allows the work to follow the worker, providing the cohesiveness of a single point of access to critical files, content, and application capabilities. Ultimately, to allow knowledge workers to work in the way most conducive to delivering their best performance, rather than being weighed down by the limits of antiquated or otherwise unresponsive systems.
