Case Management: New Mindset for Solving Business Problems
Over the past two decades, organizations have strived to continuously improve their processes by providing workers with better, faster access to information—leading to a rise in enterprise software systems that do just that.
Historically, enterprise software solutions, including business process management (BPM) and enterprise content management (ECM), have focused on automating what are often described as “low-value” manual tasks like data entry, document sorting and filing, and other transactional activities. The goal of these initiatives was to create efficiencies by reducing labor and processing costs, standardizing process activity that was repeatable and well-defined.
Today, while automation of repetitive processes continues to provide efficiency gains, organizations are seeking solutions that help workers handle higher-value activities—things like non-routine tasks, unanticipated events or unique exceptions. They’re increasingly adopting a new mindset—and seeking new ways to leverage technology—for solving this different kind of problem.
A New, Largely Untapped Area of Opportunity
According to recent research by AIIM (the Association for Information and Image Management), 51% of companies polled said that half or more of their business processes are not straightforward or predictable.1 These types of processes involve knowledge workers, who often have a high level of expertise and handle work that cannot be automated, but who require access to all information to get their jobs done. Examples include home healthcare workers interacting with patients, legal staff handling contracts and HR professionals onboarding employees.
The ability to effectively support these workers as they make decisions, collect information and drive work to desired outcomes is becoming critical in remaining competitive. For this type of work, more and more organizations are finding that traditional straight-through workflows or business process automation aren’t alone sufficient. And what is required is the added flexibility and ad hoc nature of case management functionality.
Over the past few years, the concept of case management has been shaking up the IT landscape. Once a term reserved for narrow use in spaces like legal and social services, case management—thanks in part to industry analysts like Forrester and Gartner—has grown to encompass a wide range of work processes that share some common traits. This is work that includes non-routine or unpredictable events; involves interaction with and decisions by a knowledge worker; and often requires many types of information, content and data to move work toward desired outcomes.
Everyone Benefits from Case Management
And whether you realize it or not, your organization is already tackling these types of business problems—work focused around information, work that is unpredictable, work that involves human discretion. These types of processes often directly touch your customers, constituents, students or employees. They frequently involve a variety of incremental tasks and collaboration across individuals or departments.
Case management represents a middle ground, a common thread that pulls together areas as seemingly unrelated as hospital equipment maintenance checklists, vendor procurement and the month-end financial close. All of these areas involve multiple people, multiple departments, multiple tasks, multiple types of information. All of these areas can benefit from a comprehensive case management approach. And that’s just the beginning: you can manage cases in areas like IT help desk, contract management, HR onboarding, claims processing, student relationship management, incident tracking, customer service, compliance tracking and more.
Simply put, successfully embracing case management requires organizations to adopt a new mindset for using technology to create solutions to today’s business problems. They must equip an increasingly relevant type of business users by giving them immediate, organized access to the information they need to make decisions. Effectively managing this information-centric work will keep your customers happy, your employees productive and your organization healthy and profitable—now and in the years to come.
Filling in the Gaps with Case Management
Case-driven work doesn’t fit neatly within the business process automation box—and finding technology that meets case management needs is a common struggle for organizations. For this reason, it’s key to evaluate how these needs are filled today. The critical information your knowledge workers require does exist, but it’s often scattered in multiple disconnected locations.
Think about the “gaps” that exist in your day-to-day work—areas where your major line-of-business applications or current IT investments can’t fully support. For example, workers can’t easily access related documents, notes and other context from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application or electronic medical record (EMR). As a workaround, users might be collecting and managing data in scattered spreadsheets, inefficient paper files or antiquated departmental databases, switching between these tools to find information required to complete their work. Tools like spreadsheets and paper storage offer little to no security or auditability. They also prevent access by more than one user at any given time, stifling collaboration.
You can fill in these gaps, improve your processes and empower users with a case management solution—providing a complete view of all the data and documents required to drive knowledge and make decisions.
Three Options: Build, Buy or Configure
To embrace case management solutions, you have several options: build, buy or configure. You could have your developers build applications from scratch via custom coding—but custom solutions take longer to develop and are more difficult to change, involving developers in every step of the process. Or you could purchase multiple point solutions that are each specific to one process, but point solutions—while effective for a specific use—usually can’t be easily extended or connected to other areas of your organization. So if you anticipate needing other case management applications down the road, niche solution providers might not be your best bet.
A better option is to configure business applications that support case management on a scalable, point-and-click configurable platform. By leveraging a rapid application configuration tool, you don’t have to spend time building or maintaining custom coding. IT can work directly with your business users to determine requirements and more rapidly create solutions to various business problems.