With the release of PS6 on 1st April 2013, Case Management made its appearance. In this series of blogs I intend to....
- introduce the concept of case management
- explain the anatomy of a case management project in BPM 11g
- explain the lifecycle of a typical case management project at runtime
- give pointers as to best practices in the design of a case management project
Case Management Part 1: An Introduction
Case Management Defined
There is a wealth of information out there on Case Management in it's various guises.... "Case Management", "Dynamic Case Management", "Adaptive Case Management" etc.... In my opinion the differences in these terms are mainly academic, but if pushed I would say....
- Case Management - a generic term probably signifying BPMN processes + ad-hoc tasks + content management + some kind of social capability
- Dynamic Case Management - I would bow to the following definition and diagram from Forrester...."A semi-structured but also collaborative, dynamic, human and information-intensive process that is driven by outside events and requires incremental and progressive responses from the business domain handling the case".
- Adaptive Case Management - Normally not based on BPM at all, tends to follow a Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) architecture, is supported fanatically by small niche vendors, tends to concentrate on the use-cases at the far end of the Case Management Spectrum (see later) such as medical trials where the concept of process can be anathema
So, you may be thinking "but Oracle is referring to its offering as Adaptive Case Management" - you're right, we are, but in my opinion I think we fit squarely in the realm of Dynamic Case Management.... it's all names at the end of the day and if you read enough in this area you'll find all terms are used interchangeably - only the truly dogmatic would argue the point.
Case Management Categories
Again I'll defer to Forrester and their Wave DCM Q1 2011....
... if your project fits somewhere in this then it will likely benefit from using Case Management.
Case Management Spectrum
Case Management is a broad term with a broad spectrum of use cases, from the predominantly structured and prescriptive cases such as "Employee Off-Boarding" where the majority of the case can be modeled as BPMN processes and only a small part is dynamic, to the predominantly unstructured, knowledge-worker driven cases such as "Criminal Investigation" or "Medical Trials" where very little can be modelled as BPMN processes and most is truly dymamic and on-the-fly....
Case Management in Oracle BPM 11g PS6 onwards can handle all of these cases
Coming Next
Now that you know what Case Management is (and isn't) and you've identified that your project fits the Case Management paradigm, in the next part of this blog we'll look at the anatomy of a Case Management project inside of BPM Studio in Oracle BPM 11g PS6.