We keep on hearing about process automation, how it can streamlline business processes, how it could help businesses control and audit their running daily processes, but is the whole business requirement of automation achieved nowadays?
Technollogy brought us automation to business processes by utilizing electronic workflows in the 80s and 90s, workflows that involved great amount of coding and exception handling to streamline a business process. this made automating such processes reside in the hand of IT, the more complex the process goes, the more coding and IT involvement take place to fulfill it. in the last decade, technology was improved wherby a new set of tools is introduced to business users that upgraded the workflow concept to business process management (BPM), business users were introduced to a set of tools to help formulating predefined processes with minimum coding, powered by a Microsoft Visio alike process designing tool to achieve desigining complete and robust process handling and automation, such tools allowed business users to take control over designing and implementing proceseses from IT, not only executing them. The question today is: did technology fulfill business needs of process automation, did it manage to actually automate the business and complete the cycle of a process regardless whether it is simple or complex? The answer is simply a NO!
BPM, in my opinion, failed to fully attract business users as it is meant to be, failed to fully solve their full business needs. The reason of that is simply because of it's known limitation in managing exceptions as it arises within a process. Exceptions, at a simple glance, is an unhandled transaction that may occur depending on a certain case. Business cases and it's exceptions cannot be predefined due to it's sudden and unplanned occurrences within a planned process, when such exceptional transaction arise, the process predefined structure needs to be modified a handle it, the more exceptions that arise during execution of a predefined process, the more complex a predefined business process will be, and in most of the cases, the BPM technology and tools fails to translate the exception into a predefined state that could be maintained as business continues executing. On the other hand, there are certain processes that may not be fully predefined due to another crucial factor, which is human intervention and collaboration. Take an example of a predefined process that reaches to a point where it requires additional consultation or interference by an expert or a group of knowledge worker, such a case may hang the automated execution of the predefined prosess and may, in certain situations, shift it's execution to an ad-hoc / manual handling to solve it.
Case management comes to fix the aforementioned issues, not by getting rid of BPM, but by extending it to make it more flexible, ad-hoc and collaborative. Take an example of a medical case of a patient. The process is well defined from the moment the patient reports to a registry / reception office,through assigning the medical section that needs to look into the patient case, until assigning the doctor to look into the patent case, however, there is an exception that may occur whereby the case may have to be examined by several doctors from different sections, and this depends on the severity or the criteria of the medical case itself. At this moment, the process needs to go into Ad-hoc stage where the consultants / doctors will be called to look into this case. They might get into a virtual meeting room to collaborate and comment in the case. Until a final conclusion is reached, then the whole process will be shifted back to predefined stage at the point to the last step where the patient will be forwarded to the pharmacy to get the required medicines. In between. The patient file is viewed and updated with the medical documents the were generated in the different stages of the process. such predefined and ad-hoc medical process is going to formulate the whole medical case of the patient, and will be archived for future examinations.
Case management is a set of tools that, when combined together, ensure the maximum level of information management and process automation, these tools are:
1- business process management (BPM) to manage predefined steps of processes.
2- content management (CM) to manage the different types of content that is generated and accessed through the case lifecycle.
3- collaboration and social networking to manage the human interactions and collaboration across the entire process.
4- ad- hoc based processing, which is the ability to create ad-hoc steps and add them to the predefined process at it's runtime.
5- capture technologies, to feed content management with content by capturing it from the source that generated it, being a scanner, a fax, an office document, a chatting or video session ..etc
6- process designers to allow business users to easily define a proces in a clear to follow map format.
7- process analyzers and simulators to help analyze the current execution of processes and help also simulating a recommended execution to get rid of the bottleneck.
Yes, technology is bringing us a new guest named case management, or in other meanings, advanced or dynamic case management. It is worth mentioning that, for most of the ECM leading vendors, this is considered an add-on to their existing ECM offering and capabilities, not a reinventing of the wheels of BPM. that's why, the set of tools listed above in point #3 and #4 above are two additional main core capabilities of case management that are extending the current content management and business process management products offerings that most of leading ECM vendors have nowadays. the technology cobines human centric, document centric and system centric process management into one set of capabilities that is forming the future of process automation.
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