Enterprise content management solutions and vendors are putting lot of focus on case management trend nowadays; the term is becoming a key offering with the leading enterprise content management vendors like IBM, EMC, OPEN TEXT…etc. and is a key component in marketing the ECM technology for lots of enterprises (I guess that Microsoft is still sleeping on this subject due to the fact that they still lack the main tool to process it, which is BPM).
This article will focus on defining case management and binding it to a business case, which is contract management. Of course, there would be hundreds of cases other than managing contracts in an enterprise organization. However, managing a contract is the common sense business case that can be well digested by any individual in the organization form a knowledge worker to a top executive.
Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM www.aiim.org) defines case management as: "A “case” is any project, transaction, service or response that is “opened” and “closed” over a period of time to achieve resolution of a problem, claim, request, proposal, development or other complex activity. It is likely to involve multiple persons inside and outside of the organization, with varying relationships to each other, as well as multiple documents and messages."
You may think of a case as a "folder" that contains different documents/papers, each of which represents a transaction related to the case and forms a block of information that is vital for organizations to keep for knowledge, legal or incident management purposes. An example of this is a "medical file" that represents a patient, this medical file is a case by its own, and every document inside the medical file represents an incident or a transaction that is generated because of the patient visit to a hospital or a clinic. So the patient file is opened in a certain time and it gets closed because of multiple reasons: maybe the patient is no longer visiting the hospital for quite some time or the patient is dead. A medical File case involves the patient, his doctor, the receptionist who has opened the file and the pharmacist who may prescribe medicine per doctor's recommendation.
Case management is not a product, it is a set of technologies combined together to form what is called as “Case Management”. In order to start managing cases, you need to take into consideration the combination of multiple technologies/products: Content Management, Collaboration, Records Management and Business Process Management
- Document Management / Content Management: this is the bottom layer; you need to have a repository to store the information that feeds a case, like structured and unstructured information available in documents, papers, database transactions…etc. having a solid repository in place will allow archiving of information, classification and metadata management, it will allow also gathering information and linking information together.
- Collaboration (Team Collaboration), which forms the generation and sharing of information, team spaces here are important to allow people to sit together and discuss a case. Virtual meetings, chatting, voice communication and video conferences are main tools to strengthen such collaboration, in certain cases, people need to collaborate to take a decision on a case, or consider the subject discussed as a case at the first place. People also would need to have instant access to any information that is defining a case. In our previous example, doctors may comment on certain medical case for a patient and all the outcome of this discussion (which is named “Content”) will be available for archiving and linking in the case file, which is on our example here, the patient medical file.
- E-Mail Management: E-mails are becoming the main method of communication and contain valuable and vital information. E-mail management tools will make sure to capture essential business email and include it in the case. nowadays, more than 70% of business cases start form an e-mail communication.
- Records Management: this would apply governance and legality on a case, records management would insure that any information about a case is considered legal evidence that you may take to courts or use to solve a dispute.
- Business Process Management (BPM): this is the “Last but not least” component, I would consider this as the main core component of the whole practice, this is what links all the pieces together, all the transactions that have to happen on a case needs to be pre-defined and controlled to ensure proper management of a case. The steps of opening a patient file, registering information, assigning the proper doctor, and prescribing medicine are separate process steps that has to be managed and automated using a solid business process management module / product.
