Business Process evolution
BPTrends follows the evolution of processes over the last few decades and summarizes the details as different waves:
1st Wave Process Improvement: In 70s – 80s with focus on quality and efficiency of task execution using Computerized Automation and Management Information Systems
2nd Wave – Process Reengineering: In 90s with focus on Process Innovation, “Best Practices” using Enterprise Architecture, ERP, Supply Chain Management
3rd Wave – Business Process Management: 2000+ with focus on assessment, adaptability, & agility, Continual Transformation using Business Process Management Suites (BPMS)

The market today is awash with BPM suites, some evolving from workflow management systems, some from EAI systems, and some from middleware. The common thread running through all these tools is the ability to map the processes and automate the execution. Taking the “As is” and creating an application that can be continuously modified and improved.

How are these tools/suites enabling you to ride the 3rd wave or, better still, lead on to the next wave? Enterprise 2.0?

The key promises in the 3rd wave are agility, adaptability and transformation. The business drivers leading to this wave are evolution of networked organization, extreme hyper competition, need to adopt to market demands, effective use of enterprise knowledge

These promises and drivers raise the following questions in relation to the BPM tools/suites

How are the processes using the networked nature of the organization

How are the processes allowing to compete better in the market

How flexible are the processes to adapt to changes in the market

How empowered are your people to take better decisions

While applicable across a cross-section of industry verticals, these questions are especially relevant in competitive and knowledge intensive domains like banking, insurance, telecom etc.

Most BPM suites enable users to model and execute standard processes that are very structured, prescriptive and rules based. But these tools can and do automate the interaction with human participants and systems involved in a pre-defined way.

How do these tools/suites help to answers the questions above?

A possible solution (and a school of thought) is process re-work – iterative changes to the processes. Well this solution is applicable and valid but how does it answer the questions above. For most of the situations, it may not be a practical or pragmatic to go to drawing board for the changes. Also with more combinations, the complexity of modeling the interactions grows. Very soon the process designer may face the issues of “model explosion” resulting in an overhead on maintenance and negating the promise of flexibility and agility.

The plausible approach could lie in the ability to model the flexible into the processes.
So what is the solution? Enter case management.

Case Management
A case, like a conventional business process, involves a collection of activities or tasks. However, unlike BPM, the process from initiation to completion of the case is not easily constrained to a process diagram. This is because the interactions are unpredictable and the focus is on the work to be done not the process to support it. So which activities need to be performed in order to complete the case depends on the details of each instance. Furthermore, users can add new tasks, data objects, documents – even new processes – to the case while it is processing. Case management inherently carries with it fluidity of structure or ad hoc-ness.
A common component in systems that provide case management is the electronic case folder. It acts as a single container for all of the processes, tasks, data, and documents for the case. The notion of a shared case folder, as opposed to a routed process instance, gives case management the flavor of team collaboration as well.

A case management solution offers the flexibility needed by a knowledge worker in handling a particular case based on the context. A case model allows defining the recommendations and suggestions for decisions in the flow of activities for the knowledge worker, yet restricting the decisions needed for adherence of compliance and regulations.