DST Case Management Indoctrination Day Continues! With @JMo1113

Judith Morley, product manager for DST’s case management, presented at a business breakout at AWD ADVANCE on the need for case management (which was pretty much already covered in John Vaughn’s keynote and Neil Ward-Dutton’s breakout session), and stressed the need for allowing context and collaboration, as well as individual decision-making. She made the distinction between adaptive case management and production case management, and maintained that AWD provides both, although might lean more toward the PCM end of the spectrum.

They’ve added capabilities to their traditional structured BPM to provide case management functionality on the same platform, not a different tool or application: it manifests through a user workspace that can be enabled for specific users, but also introduces concepts of case ownership, tasks within cases (same as existing AWD tasks), task due date forecasts and prioritization, and team stats to aid with collaboration. As with the remainder of the AWD10 platform, these are all available as RESTful services and widgets, so are easily integrated with other web-based platforms. There’s an activity stream view of everything related to a case and its tasks; note that this is a view of activity on a single case, not an activity stream of everything going on that we see in other social BPM/case management products: effectively, this is a history log of the case, although it also allows commenting on any of the activity entries.

Since AWD customers have a lot of proven processes in production already, cases can invoke these existing processes, often in order to kick off tasks done by someone else other than the knowledge worker who owns the case, such as sending an item for data entry after approval. There’s a case template that’s created within their design studio where the tasks within the case are listed, and can either be linked to an existing process or to a generic case model that is just a user task. Tasks can have dependencies, as well as their own due dates based on case creation or predecessor task dates. It appears, although I’m not completely sure, that all tasks in a case have to be defined at design time, not added on the fly by knowledge workers. Update: as Judith added in her comment to this post, you can add tasks at runtime, too.

Coming up in future releases: mobile support (although it already works on a full-size tablet); task groups that are instantiated on milestones rather than at case creation; automation, particularly in the area of work assignment, integrated comments to move the existing comment styles into the new activity stream style; custom skinning/branding of the user interface; enhanced view for managers that shows aggregate information for their teams; and monitoring for knowledge work to show true progress indicators.

btw, my post title came from the presenter herself.