Thinking Beyond Traditional BPM Webinar Replay And Slides

The webinar that I did on Smart Process Applications (a Forrester term, but one that is being adopted by a number of case management/application development vendors) was broadcast today, sponsored by OpenText, and is available for replay here.

You can also check out my slides below:

AWD Product Madness With @lw927

I finished up my day at AWD ADVANCE in the product roadmap session held by Lisa Williams and Mike Lovell. It’s March Madness here in the US (that’s some college basketball thing) so they kept with that theme with mini basketballs and some yearbook pics of Lisa on the court.

Like any vendor’s product management group, they need to consider (and anticipate) the market for their products, and spend their resources most wisely to add capabilities that will be of most value to their customers while supporting or deprecating existing features. Here’s what’s coming:

  • Dynamic case management in v10.7, expected at the end of May; we heard about this in detail from Judith Morley this morning and will include mobile capabilities in a future version
  • Seamless installation process (this tweet from the hands-on labs here says that’s probably true)
  • Overall usability including people/roles administration in v10.9; they have a lot of new plans for user portals
  • Enhance monitoring capabilities and deprecate the existing BI client
  • Process design and orchestration
  • Communications service for multi-channel correspondence management

There was a laundry list of features coming up, and some audible approval in the room for things that sound small but I know can be huge for reusability, such as variable timers and support for localized business day calendars.

Dates beyond v10.7 are not announced, although likely they will not meet their past targets of two releases per year with some of the major changes in progress now. I think that they’re also challenged somewhat by a customer base that is dragging their feet moving off the legacy platform – still about 1/3 on it – and then start to take advantage of the new functionality once they’re on the new platform. It’s hard to be completely forward-thinking when there are still active instances of your software that are old enough to vote.

Looking to the 3-5 year horizon, it’s about creating products that allow their customers to adapt to changing business environments: primarily, shifting from “imaging and workflow” (which is how many of their customers categorize what AWD does for them) to “customer event management”. They talked about some of the areas where this innovation is likely to happen: capture, moving from paper to direct data entry by the customer, and mobile check capture; predictive analytics and simulation; adaptive case management, as opposed to the production case management that’s launching soon; work allocation to support collaborative/team work; user experience; and more. Nothing specific here, and also nothing that’s groundbreaking from a market perspective, but will likely shake things up for their conservative customer base.

That’s it for me at AWD ADVANCE for 2013, it’s been a great day of presentations following a fun customer advisory board dinner last night that included discussions of my cat on Twitter. I’m on a plane again next week – third week in a row – to the Gartner BPM show in DC.

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. Smile

A Case For Change With @neilwd

Neil Ward-Dutton spoke at the first business-themed breakout session here at AWD ADVANCE on the topic of case management: how it represents a shift in thinking from our old rigid processes that don’t serve customers all that well in today’s environment. We are truly in the age of the consumer, with so much choice in online purchasing (15% of which is being done from mobile devices), but also through showrooming, which forces bricks-and-mortar retailers to price competitively with online alternatives. Customer expectations for service and experience have changed – I talk about this a lot in my presentations on social BPM – and if you don’t meet those expectations, they’ll not only pick another supplier, but influence their friends to do so, too.

Structured BPM, where all processes are defined in advance, just doesn’t work for many customer-facing processes; rather than quality and efficiency, the key is flexibility and support for knowledge workers to make decisions about what to do next. That doesn’t mean that things won’t be efficient and of high quality; if you let a knowledge worker “do the right thing” to achieve a goal, then it will more likely be faster and better than having them try to work around the system when it doesn’t allow them to handle exceptions properly. As Neil pointed out, if you’re modeling your processes and find that you’re spending a lot of time modeling exceptions, then maybe you should be looking at a less structured approach. Structured processes do work in some situations – manufacturing, straight-through processing and the like – but you have to consider which of your processes would be better served by defining less up front, allowing for exception handling and fast-changing processes to provide a better customer experience.

He introduced the concept of case management as a goal-oriented environment for knowledge work, guided by best practices and rules/constraints, but where the knowledge worker creates the process on the fly. There may be predefined tasks and process fragments that can be selected by the worker, or they may define their own. The case is a persistent artifact – representing a customer, a complaint, or whatever is defined as a case – containing both content (documents) and a record of the actions taken, so that analytics can be used to determine how similar situations were handled in the past.

He left the audience with a great question: how do you build your work around your customer? Clearly, in many cases, the answer includes case management.

Everything’s New At DST

John Vaughn opened AWD ADVANCE 2013 talking about a new focus for DST: a new CEO (following the retirement of their very first one), a new organizational structure (bringing together product and hosting groups into a single business process solutions group), 66% of customers either on or moving to the new platform, new case management functionality, new visibility with analysts and in the market (woo hoo! I’m listed on the slide with the “big guys”), new social media engagement (Vaughn’s activity on Twitter has probably moved that along), and new ways of dealing with customers. Great vision for moving forward, although those comfortable with DST’s conservative pace in the past may be a bit nervous, especially when he used the term “sunsetting” about their legacy platform.

He highlighted a number of sessions that will be going on here today and tomorrow, and challenged the companies in the room to start thinking differently since AWD now supports new ways of working. As he put it, “a lot of your workflows are older than my kids”; he pointed out that the business world is changing and customer expectations are changing. Social and mobile are not going away, and they are driving customer channels and interactions. Crowdsourcing and microwork (outsourcing on a task level) are changing how work gets done inside organizations. The old way of doing things is just too expensive, and doesn’t meet customer needs; change or die (the last being my words, but his implication). On the big data front – every vendor keynote has to hit all the hot industry topics – Vaughn noted that since most of their customers don’t ever delete their scanned images, it’s time to start mining those for better informational context about customers. This is potentially a huge deal: I have many customers with millions of images, and if some recognition could be applied (even at relatively poor recognition rates), the benefits for big data and analytics would be incredible. Or scary, if you prefer.

On a slight tangent, next month DST will be releasing TreeSwing: a completely mobile investment platform for those with less than $10k to invest, providing a link from the investor’s checking account to a curated set of mutual fund investments for micro-investments (DST is a registered financial broker/dealer, so can do this legally as well as having the industry knowledge to do so). It includes a number of social features, including location aware coupons (e.g., save $1 at Starbucks and invest it instead), gamification  and more. Interestingly, DST launched it at SXSW, which is not how most large software companies roll. Certainly gives them some street cred in the mobile and social markets.

Case Management Webinar Tomorrow

I’m speaking about case management on a webinar tomorrow at 2pm Eastern; you can sign up to attend here. It’s sponsored by IBM, but there will be no IBM speaker on the webinar, just me and some time for Q&A. Although titled as “Adaptive Advanced Case Management”, IBM’s case management (and most of what I’m discussing) is more about what is becoming known as “Production Case Management”, where work has a great deal of predictability and variability but there is value in having some pre-defined templates to structure the work.

From the abstract:

When a company is processing a customer order, claim, loan, contract, audit, or benefit, exceptions happen. How companies deal with those exceptions can mean the difference between a happy customer or employee or one that walks away – and tells other friends and business associates about their negative experience. In fact, with the speed and reach of social media, it is imperative that all exceptions are escalated and resolved as quickly and as simply as possible. Putting the process into the end users’ hands via an automated case management solution such as IBM Software’s Advanced Case Management (ACM) can help companies not only improve customer service but gain other benefits such as increased sales, reducing customer churn, and a reduction of fraud.

However, adopting a formal, automated approach takes real change – both on the business side as well as in IT. However, once it is implemented in conjunction with proven best practices, organizations are equipped to handle practically any case management scenario in nearly any domain. Learn more about how IBM’s ACM solution can help your organization.

By attending this webcast you will learn:

  • About the many case management challenges that companies face today
  • Why today’s businesses require more insight, responsiveness and collaboration when it comes to handling exceptions than they ever did
  • Best practices to help you close cases efficiently and with better results
  • Ways that you can extract more value out of case management data to create a better outcome and avoid having the same issues crop up in the future
  • How an advanced case management solution can help an organization be more responsive, closing cases faster and with fewer resources.
  • How ACM support all information sources to provide a 360-degree view of the case – while at the same time support consistent, multi-channel output including correspondence, email, web, call center, text and others as customers demand

In spite of the direct mention of IBM’s Case Manager in the abstract, I won’t be talking about it or any other product specifically. I’ll be discussing the challenges for knowledge workers and how case management can assist them, with some examples.

BPM in the Great White North: OpenText BPM Seminar

When a conference or seminar pitches up in my own backyard, I try to make the time to attend, and this morning I attended a morning seminar given by OpenText in Toronto. I’m not currently scheduled to make it to their big Enterprise World conference next month in Orlando, so this was a good chance for an update. We were at the CMA Ontario offices, which offers co-working/training space for hire; the VP of corporate services of CMA gave a quick intro to state that they’re a recent OpenText content services customer and are interested in helping to start up an OpenText user group. I expect that the biggest challenge will be the breadth of products under the OpenText umbrella due to the several acquisitions that they’ve made over the past few years, which I think makes OpenText the only vendor with more BPM products than IBM.

OpenText is Canada’s largest software company with about 5,000 employees. I know, you didn’t even know that OpenText is Canadian, just like Justin Bieber, Keanu Reeves, Alanis Morissette and Jim Carrey. Beauty, eh?

Today’s session was likely aimed at OpenText’s base of content management customers, and Gerry Gibney, their senior strategist for financial services, introduced their offerings in the BPM space: BPM (meaning structured BPM), dynamic case management, high volume imaging, business planning and modeling, and process-centric applications. He walked through some of their customer case studies:

  • Case management for loans operations at ATB Financial
  • Case management to manage investment fund transactions and call centers at Citi Fund Services
  • Process/business modeling and architecture for mainframe migration planning and frameworks at JPMC
  • Case management for account opening and fund administration at Rothschild Bank Luxembourg
  • BPM for managing customer profiles and a variety of administrative (non-customer) processes at PNC Bank
  • Case management for back office processing in fund management at Penson (which appears to be ceasing operations in Canada, so may cease to be a good case study)
  • Case management for new business processes at Chartis
  • BPA and BPM for underwriting compliance reviews at Geico
  • Business architecture modeling for insurance processes and ITIL at MetLife
  • Case management for insurance claims processing at American International Assurance Asia
  • Business architecture modeling at American Express
  • BPM (explicitly Metastorm) for case management at the US Social Security Administration

There were a few more, intended to show the applicability of their BPM solutions, but this does not, of course, represent implementations of a single product: it’s the legacy of Global 360, Metastorm and Proforma acquisitions for case management, structured BPM, and BPA, respectively. In some of the situations, Metastorm BPM (MBPM) has been used for case management, and undoubtedly Global360 has been used for structured BPM even though they’re positioned differently now that they share a portfolio. He finished up showing the 2010 Gartner and Forrester MQ/Wave diagrams where they’re in the top right corner; in the new Gartner iBPMS MQ, where they should play well, they’ve been relegated to the lower left, in part because of the uncertainty of their BPM roadmap.

We then heard from an OpenText (Metastorm BPM) customer, Catharine MacKenzie, who manages business systems development at the Mutual Fund Dealers Association, a regulatory body for companies that sell mutual funds in Canada. With about 120 member companies, they define rules and bylaws, perform compliance audits, handle inquiries, manage enforcement cases and disciplinary hearings, and impose penalties for non-compliance.

They started as an eDocs (Hummingbird) customer, and now use Metastorm BPM as well within their predominantly Microsoft and .NET environment. They went with BPM because there was no out of the box solution that would support their regulatory processes – they were previously managed using manual processes and Excel spreadsheets – and provide them with the ability to quickly create and maintain custom processes with a limited IT budget. Although they do have some completely custom-built systems, their preference is to build process-centric applications on the BPM platform instead in order to reduce cost and time while providing a good match to their business requirements. Starting their search in 2005, they did a proof of concept with two vendors in 2006, selected Metastorm and set up their environment. In 2007 they deployed their first product processes: compliance examinations (for audits), call logs (logging inquiries), enforcement referrals and enforcement intake. They added another process in 2008, two more in 2009, nine in 2010, three in 2011 and one in 2012. They have another five planned before the end of 2012. All in all, a pretty impressive track record for implementation.

Although they had a recommendation (likely from the partner, although that wasn’t stated) to implement purchase orders first, they wisely ignore that and went straight for the core regulatory processes. Executive review provides a lot of input into what processes are implemented and in what order, which tends to drive a more strategic direction and shows the benefits of full-on management involvement. Interestingly, the question about what process to start with always comes up with I give a general BPM presentation; I always recommend starting with something that really matters to the business since, as I’ve stated previously, no one ever justified enterprise-wide deployment of BPM by doing a proof of concept with managing expense reports. I talked to MacKenzie about this at the break and told her that I agreed with this strategy, and she unknowingly echoed my opinion that in the grander scheme of BPM, no one cares about expense reports.

She shared their lessons learned, including benefits (rapid development and deployment; built-in process auditing) and challenges (business needs to own the process, not IT; testing is difficult and time-consuming), then was joined by Jeff Vila, their business systems analyst who went through the BPM process and data flow in detail. He showed the actual process map for a few of their processes; MBPM is still using their own proprietary notation, not BPMN. They’re currently migrating to version 9; MacKenzie stated this as one of their challenges, but Vila said that there were some enhancements to the development environment in things such as form design, so they’re expecting it to be beneficial overall.

They see MBPM as a tool for people who are primarily business-oriented, although some programming experience is beneficial; in response to an audience question, Vila stated that he has a commerce background, and although he had taken a few Microsoft programming courses, the MBPM training courses probably would have been sufficient to get up to speed on most of the functionality. It doesn’t sound like they’re using the business architecture tools that OpenText offers (ProVision), although I would have thought that OpenText would be practically flinging this at their BPM and case management customers to help adoption as well as improve the quality of the BPM implementations.

Their eDocs content management is completely separate from MBPM: there is a cross-reference link between them, but that’s managed by custom code and manual processes, not through any inherent links between the products. I don’t think that eDocs is really OpenText’s main push for content management so that link may never happen at a deep product level, but it that might be something that OpenText provides as a developer add-on.

The last part of the morning was Doug Johnson, OpenText director of product management, on the actual products and some of the new BPM features that have been released or are coming up soon:

  • Mobile BPM, apparently through HTML5
  • Integration with their content server (although likely not older/non-core platforms such as eDocs)
  • Capture Center to ingest faxed/scanned images and kick off related processes
  • Process intelligence into a manager view (based, perhaps, on the previous Global360 persona-based views?) for reports and analysis
  • Cloud deployment (not clear if this is multitenant and self-provisioning, or some sort of hosted server implementation)
  • Vertical applications
  • Social capabilities, which in part he (somewhat misleadingly) described as skills-based routing

Although not new, he spoke about the MBPM integration and automation capabilities where a developer can create reusable components and libraries that are exposed to the process designer in the graphical development environment for inclusion in processes.

He covered a bit of ProVision’s functionality in business planning and analysis, including providing governance over standard operating procedures as documented, as well as insights for future planning.

He then moved on to Case360 for dynamic case management, describing their case folder concept as well as extensive connections to multiple ECM systems (probably using CMIS, although he didn’t state that). He described how it allows users to do high-performance focused work – usually seen as more the sweet spot of structured BPM – and captures a variety of robust analytics.

These three products – Metastorm BPM for structured BPM, Case360 for case management, and ProVision for process analysis – form their BPM portfolio; unfortunately, he doesn’t make a strong distinction on the boundaries between the products (especially MBPM and Case360), and that’s the part of their strategy that they really need to get straight. I beat up IBM all the time about their failure to do the same thing with IBM BPM and FileNet, but IBM is a big company that can afford to have several BPM offerings (even if it’s confusing to the customers), while OpenText is

He then “pre-announced” OpenText Assure (I didn’t see an NDA or embargo on this session, so have included it here) which I assume is coming out at their conference next month. It appears to be a sort of high-level development environment that allows users to create their own apps, or more of an application that can be configured by business users. He showed some screens of a self-service portal for common business services, extensible apps and configurable business processes, although not completely clear what is the native environment versus what can be built with it. Built on MBPM, hence providing all the underlying capability, and soon to be available on the OpenText Cloud, Assure appears to primarily be a delivery platform for configurable vertical applications and/or templates. Someone from OpenText, feel free to jump into the comments and provide some clarification. Or invite me to Orlando so I can see for myself.

ACM Workshop at BPM2012: BPMN Smackdown by @swensonkeith

In the last portion of the ACM workshop at BPM 2012, we had a couple of short non-research papers, the first of which was by Keith Swenson, in which he posits that BPMN is incompatible with ACM. He starts by saying that it’s not a critique of BPMN in particular, but of any two-dimensional flow diagram notation. He also makes a distinction between production case management and adaptive case management – a distinction that I find to be a bit artificial since I don’t think that there’s a hard line between them – where PCM systems have developers creating systems for people to use, whereas ACM has people doing the work themselves. The distinction between PCM and ACM has created a thin, rarified slice of what remains defined as ACM: doctors and lawyers are favorite examples, and it is self-evident that you’re not going to get either doctors or lawyers to draw event-driven BPMN models with the full set of 100+ elements for their processes, or to follow rigidly defined processes in order to accomplish their daily tasks. Instead, their “processes” should be represented as checklists, so that users can completely understand all of the tasks, and can easily modify the process as required.

He states that drawing a diagram (such as BPMN) requires a level of abstract thinking that is common with developers but not with end users, hence BPMN is really a programming language. Taking all of that together, you can see where he’s coming from, even if you disagree: if a system uses BPMN to model processes, most people will not understand  how BPMN models work [if they are drawn in full complexity by developers, I would add], therefore won’t modify them; if all users can’t modify the process, then it’s not ACM. Furthermore, creating a flow model with temporal dependencies where no such dependencies exist in reality hinders adaptability, since people will be forced to follow the flow even if there is another way to accomplish their goals that might be more appropriate in a particular context.

Therefore,

BPMN ⇒~ACM

My problem with this is that BPMN has been used by developers to create complex flow models because both the language and their organization allows them to, but that’s not the only way to use it. You can use a limited subset of BPMN to create flow models – in cases where flow models are appropriate, such as when there are clear temporal dependencies – that are understandable by anyone involved in those processes. You can create a BPMN diagram that is a collection of ad hoc tasks that don’t have temporal dependencies, which is semantically identical to a checklist. You can create alternative views, so that a model may be viewed in different forms by different audiences. In other words, just like Jessica Rabbit, BPMN isn’t bad, it’s just drawn that way.

ACM Workshop at BPM2012: ACM in Practice

The first part of the afternoon at the ACM workshop at BPM 2012 moved away from theory and research, and into actual implementations of ACM plus the emerging CMMN standard.

Helle Frisak Sem of Computas presented a paper that she co-authored with her colleagues Steinar Carlsen and Gunnar John Coll, describing an ACM system that is in production at the Norwegian Food Safety Authorty (NFSA) for food safety inspections, information and investigations. This implementation was the recipient of a 2012 ACM award. At its core, the control activity module of the system has the concept of a case that is a rich folder of information about a person or business. The case manager performs tasks (such as schedule and document food inspections) in the context of a case. Each task type has a complete task template that contains all of the possible steps relevant to this task type; at runtime, the user sees a derived list of steps based on conditions in order to complete the task (similar to Ilia Bider’s respondent systems theory), which includes concepts of step dependencies and optional versus mandatory steps. Steps may appear and disappear based on changing conditions, and the user can complete the steps in any order unless there are specific dependencies. Each step, as completed, contributes to the case folder so that a complete record of every task exists. In addition to regular inspections, the system has an emergency response module for managing incidents such as livestock disease outbreak: unlike the more structured inspection tasks, this is used more for logging the incidents, proposing actions and logging decisions, as well as logging media requests and responses.

The control activity module is much more structured and pre-defined, and is hence domain-specific; the emergency control module is domain independent, since it does not contain much, if any, specific domain knowledge. A couple of questions emerged: first, whether domain-neutral systems are really ACM systems, or whether domain specificity is one of the characteristics of ACM. Secondly, the degree of adaptability that is required to be considered ACM, given a spectrum from structured to unstructured: process-driven server integration, human process management, production case management, adaptive case management. As you can imagine, I really like this spectrum because it’s very close to being a relabelling of the “spectrum” diagram that I created last year in which I stated that it’s not about BPM versus ACM, rather a spectrum of process functionality – it’s much more productive in the real world to think about the majority of the processes that fit somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, not at either extreme.

The next paper was Rüdiger Pryss of Ulm University describing a mobile task management system for medical ward rounds (i.e., doctors with iPads). Conveniently, the university also has a hospital, and they started out looking at ways to integrate workflow into ward rounds, but found that it didn’t work with the way that doctors worked when they were doing rounds, which traditionally uses pen and paper to create a to-do list as they walk around and see patients. Moving to an iPad-based system for managing their tasks on the rounds required the doctors to change their methods, although a lot of work on user experience was done in order to replicate their preferred way of working while maintaining input speed through templates and voice input. It was also able to add significant value by integrating patient information as well as predefined workflows for specific tasks to be performed by others, such as xrays. Interestingly, although the technical aspects of task management improved, the patient communication degraded since the doctors were documenting on the iPad while they were with the patient instead of waiting until after seeing the patient to document on paper, as they did previously; it was overall less time but the experience needs to be reworked, possibly with two doctors using linked iPads to interview and document simultaneously.

Last up in this section was a paper authored by Mike Marin, Richard Hull and Roman Vaculin of IBM, presented by one of their colleagues from the Haifa research lab, on the emerging OMG standard for case management  modeling and notation (CMMN). Unfortunately, OMG does not release any information about proposed or in-progress standards, only published ones, so many of us have never seen this before. At the heart of CMMN is a case folder object, based on CMIS, which includes folders, documents and properties for both. The top-level behavioral model includes tasks (where work is performed, both manual and automated), stages (hierarchical clustering of work) and milestones (business-related operational objectives); progression through stages is controlled by worker requests and by sentries (rules), and dependencies can be indicated although there is not strictly a flow model. Stages in case instances can have scope lists, which indicate discretionary tasks. OMG manages the BPMN standard, and there is definitely a lot of BPMN-ness about CMMN. I think that a key question will be whether the two standards can be merged into a single standard.

ACM Workshop at BPM2012: Supporting Collaborative Work

We heard two more papers in the morning, the first presented by Nicolas Mundbrod of Ulm University on system support for collaborative knowledge work (paper co-authored by Jens Kolb and Manfred Reichert). This is the first of the papers today that is starting to show some of the crossover with social software: they studied the characteristics of collaborative knowledge work – uncertainty, goal orientation, emergence of work, and growing knowledge base – in order to determine what functionality is required to support it. From this, they defined nine dimensions by which to measure collaborative knowledge work: knowledge action types (e.g., acquisition, application, dissemination), methodology (e.g., explicit, tacit), interdisciplinarity (range from domain-specific to interdisciplinary), organizational frame (e.g., project, case, spontaneous), spatial proximity (range from direct to remote), involved knowledge workers (range from two to countless), temporary constraints (e.g., fixed, relative), information interdependency (range from no focus to main focus on interdependencies), and number of repetitions (range from unique to frequent). Based on the dimensions and characteristic, they developed a collaborative knowledge work lifecycle based on the BPM lifecycle and knowledge work lifecycle: orientation leading into template design, collaboration runtime, and records evaluation. Records evaluation is not just after-the-fact analysis of cases, but acts as an information source during the collaborative runtime. They feel that there are a number of tools that target specific aspects of the collaborative lifecycle, but that more research is required on systems to support this type of knowledge work, especially for the cross over between knowledge work and more structured workflow. There were some interesting discussions following, including about other related research such as modifying the knowledge work environment (including which steps are required) based on the experience of the individual worker so that novice workers can be guided without annoying experienced workers.

Staying with the theme of systems for supporting work, Irina Rychkova of University Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne presented on automated support for case management processes with declarative configurable specifications. She maintains that process models are important for a shared understanding of work, but that a traditional BPMS cannot properly manage case management processes because of the unpredictability, variability and emergent nature of process instances. In her research, she attempted to model a flexible process (mortgage application) with BPMN, but found a number of challenges: the tradeoffs between flexibility and complexity when creating the model, especially when dealing with optional and required information; and runtime adaptability, requiring a lot of human expertise and decision-making and reducing reusability. Instead, she proposes configuration mechanisms to allow processes to be configured (data objects and rules) during runtime, which allows for a more adaptable process as well as collecting information to improve models in the future. She maintains that the problem with BPMN is not the language itself, but about modeling style: for case management, instead of using an imperative style that defines tasks in a specific order, we need to use a declarative style where tasks can be defined without explicit ordering, but with rules that allow tasks to be dynamically enabled and disabled based on conditions. BPMN works well for an imperative style of process models, but some new notation – or extension to BPMN – is required to represent configurable data objects, optional data objects, complex/composite structure of data objects, and conditionally obligatory/optional/alternative data objects based on rules. Similarly, there is a need to model the rules that drive these configurations during runtime. There is quite a bit of other research being done on declarative/goal-based process models, and some number of products emerging in this area. There are also a lot of differing opinions on whether BPMN is suitable for modeling case management processes. It’s not clear that BPMN will emerge as the standard for this sort of modeling, but it’s worth considering if it can be extended to suit because of its already widespread (albeit shallow) adoption.