First, a disclaimer.

The following piece is about my evolving understanding of case management in the BPM space. I have explicitly dropped or ignored leading adjectives like 'dynamic' and 'adaptive' because I simply don't care about the fractional differences of meaning that these words bring with them.

I, also, think of myself as working in the process or business process management space, not in case management. Despite this feeling, many (perhaps, most) of the implementations I worked on involve a case management approach but without explicit case management tools. Perhaps, that is the root of my confusion.

The Meaning of Words

Finding a clear definition of case management can be difficult so I enjoyed the keynote at EbizQ’s BPM in Action virtual conference last week. In Forrester Analyst Craig Le Clair’s key note, he offered the following formulation:

Clear? Me neither.

The rest of the presentation did, in fact, make things clearer. Case Managements involves business rules engines, document management and business process management technology. It is the opposite of ERP or single pre-packed applications and fundamentally it empowers the knowledge worker to be the master of his domain.

All this explanation got me thinking that case management isn’t a technology or cluster of technologies at all but a method of implementing basically any non-ERP technology which puts the knowledge worker at the center of the implementation.

The Waves

Forrester, of course, has a Case Management wave and the top vendors are Pegasystems, IBM, EMC and Appian.

Strangely, the top vendors in their most recent BPM wave are Pegasystems, IBM and Appian.

So, it's not the technology. It must be the implementation.