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What’s Next For BPM? bpmNEXT!

Sometime last year, I ran into Bruce Silver at a conference, and he told me about a new conference that he was planning together with Nathaniel Palmer, called bpmNEXT. As Bruce described it then, and as it says on the recently launched website, “Part TED, part DEMO, part Think Tank, bpmNEXT is not your usual BPM conference”. The concept is to see and discuss BPM innovation, not the same old stuff that we see at so many BPM vendor and analyst conferences every year, and to do it through demonstrations of new technology and ideas as well as presentations. I remember chatting with him at the time about how we needed to have something like the BPM Think Tanks back in the day when they were really about vendors, analysts and hard-core practitioners getting together to hash through ideas about how the industry needed to evolve. Then 2008 came, Think Tank tried to become a business-focused BPM conference with lots of case studies from customers, and it died a quick death – you can look back through my posts on three years of BPM Think Tank to see how it evolved.

We need a place where people involved in creating the next generation of BPM software can get together and collaborate, even if they’re competitors outside the conference. bpmNEXT has the potential to become that place.

bpmNEXT is now ready to go for March 19-21 at the Asilomar resort in Pacific Grove (Monterey), a 2-hour drive south San Francisco. The speaker list is impressive: these are all vendors, but the topics are focused on emerging capabilities. Process mining, analytics, simulation, internet of things, mobile, cloud, ACM and more; Bruce has a summary of the program in his latest blog post. Lots of people who I know, and many who I know virtually and look forward to meeting face-to-face.

You’ve already missed the extreme early bird pricing that they had last fall, but there is still a chance to sign up at a discount until February 19th – note that the price includes two nights lodging and meals. You can download a brochure here; I’m listed as a media sponsor, which means that I will be blogging from bpmNEXT, but I am only being comped the conference portion of the fee, not any travel and living expenses, and I’m definitely not being paid for my time.

I hope to see you there. If you’re in the Bay area and want to connect with me that week outside the conference days, let me know early enough that I can make extended travel arrangements.

New Mobile Theme

Since the Jetpack plugin is now available on self-hosted WordPress sites, I’m gradually rolling out more of its features. Today, I enabled its mobile theme (disabling the previous MobilePress plugin, which hasn’t been updated in over two years), please let me know if you experience any problems with it. Note that it only changes the theme for smartphones, not for tablets, which is the same behavior as MobilePress.

I’m also using Jetpack for site stats (replacing StatCounter code, although I still use Google Analytics), sharing (for the buttons at the bottom of each post, replacing the WP Tweet Button plugin) and a few other functions. If you’re running WordPress, definitely worth checking out what’s in Jetpack.

IBM On Business Analytics In Banking With @LaurenceTrigwel

I was on an IBM analyst call this morning on analytics in banking, featuring Laurence Trigwell, who is responsible for IBM’s business analytics strategy for the Financial Services industry.

In response to a number of challenges that banks (and other financial institutions) are facing, he identified three key initiatives for these companies:

Creating a customer-focused enterprise
Optimize risk and compliance
Increase flexibility and streamline operations

Obviously, analytics are pretty important to all of this, and IBM continues to focus on building their analytics portfolio with acquisitions such as Algorithmics and capabilities such as Watson. As with all of their portfolios, the IBM analytics portfolio contains a number of different products, making it a bit difficult for customers (and probably IBM sales reps) to wade through the potential solutions; however, for the purposes of this presentation, Trigwell has organized them around the three key initiatives listed above.

For creating a customer-focused enterprise, you need performance management, business intelligence and predictive analytics in order to gain insights from customer data to “provide the most profitable offer to the right customer at the right time”. Although this sort of “next best action” view of analytics for customer focus is part of the picture, I think that it misses the point completely: the stated goal (in quotes above) is really focused on the enterprise, not the customer, since it has enterprise profitability at the core. Not that profitability isn’t important, but if you’re going to be truly customer-focused, you need to have some goals stated as actual direct customer benefits. It might be the same thing, since providing an offer that is best suited to a customer’s needs means that they are more likely to accept it, which in turn results in great profitability in a probabilistic sense, but using language that is actually customer-focused when you’re talking about becoming a customer-focused enterprise is important to shift corporate culture.
For optimizing risk and compliance, you will need risk management, governance, performance management, compliance and business intelligence capabilities. I don’t disagree with this, and analytics (as well as other things, such as BPM) can definitely turn risk management and compliance from just overhead to a competitive advantage, if you do it well.
For increasing flexibility and streamlining operations, you will need performance management, predictive analytics and business intelligence capabilities for identifying process bottlenecks and operational inefficiencies. This is really about displaying and reporting on what’s happening, not fixing the problems, so not a sense-and-respond view of analytics or how it fits into process management in general.

In each of these three scenarios, the capabilities that he is suggesting that you need are actually IBM products: from three to five products for each scenario if you want to go all out. They have bundled some of these into industry solutions, but it’s not clear what the level of integration between the products is to create a seamless solution, or if they’re only integrated on the PO. Clearly, IBM needs to do some rationalization of their analytics portfolio to reduce the number of products (as they need to do in some of their other portfolios), although their usual strategy is to allow acquired companies to run pretty much untouched for quite a long time before starting to merge products. That strategy is good for the sales teams and the executives of the acquired company, but not necessary good for customers who have to deal with an increasingly large and bewildering array of products that overlap in functionality. The case studies that he discussed typically used only one product, either Algorithmics or Cognos, although one used both Cognos and SPSS, so I’m not sure that there’s much of an appetite for multiple analytics products applied to the same initiative.

In all cases, he talks about analytics as identifying/reporting on issues/situations, but not much on how analytics need to fit together with other systems to make it all happen. He touches on a bit of this with some of his case studies, but it would be great to see the analytics for banking shown in the context of other IBM products that can really make the three initiatives real, such as CRM, BPM and ECM.

Since banks and other financial institutions are my main customer base for consulting, and they’re all IBM customers, it will be interesting to see how they roll out some of the newer IBM products and solutions, especially in combination, in the years to come.

Reorganization Underway

In the anticipation of ramping back up with blogging this year, I’m doing a bit of housekeeping. I’ve been getting the urge to write things longer than 140 characters at a time, and to keep my content someplace where I have better control over it, prompted in part by this article.

First of all, I’m converting all of my conference subcategories to tags, since they have got a bit out of control with the number of conferences that I attend. I’m using a redirect so that if you had a link to the conference category page before, it should redirect to the tag page, but let me know if that’s not happening. If you follow the comments feed, you will see a flurry of activity, since updating a post causes any trackbacks to be refreshed, which appear in the comments feed.

Second, I’ll likely be changing the theme fairly soon to something that allows (at the very least) nested comments. Last time I tried this, I had complaints from a few people on IE6 saying that their browser didn’t support some of the feature properly, but the percentage of IE6 readers has dropped to 0.1% so likely no longer an issue. Again, if you see a problem with the new theme, let me know.

Third, I’ve trimmed out a number of unused plugins and some widgets from the sidebar, which may improve speed somewhat.

Fourth, I’ve added more sharing options at the end of each post – Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn – to replace the Twitter share button that used to be at the beginning of each post.

Update: Fifth, I’m replacing some of the little-used or old categories with tags, but without a redirect since I don’t think that there’s much linking to them. If you have a link to a category that no longer works, either check for the same name in a /tag/ URL rather than a /category/ URL, or let me know and I’ll add an explicit redirect.

Going Paperless On A Small Scale

Earlier this week, I linked to the Paperless 2013 website, a vendor-sponsored initiative that encourages businesses to cut paper, ostensibly for environmental reasons. The products featured by the sponsor vendors – Google Drive, HelloFax, Manilla, HelloSign, Expensify, Xero and Fujitsu ScanSnap – can certainly assist with this, although I run a completely paperless office using only one of those (Google Drive), and that one only in a secondary role. The interesting part was a conversation that ensued with another small business owner, although she was primarily interested in going paperless with personal documents (which I have also done), which made me realize that most small businesses are a bit clueless about how to go about this in a secure and legal fashion. I’ve been involved in large-scale document scanning projects since the 1980s, and I’ve gathered a lot of ideas about how to do this on a scale suitable for organizations of any size, so I thought that I’d lay out a plan suitable for small businesses.

Keep in mind that although I run a single person business, it’s incorporated, so I have the same paperwork requirements as any other private company: invoicing, payroll, government filings, income tax and all. I also do some amount of document collaboration with other small businesses, as well as for some non-profits with which I’m involved.

Here’s how I keep paperless:

If I receive a document in electronic form, I leave it in electronic form unless I absolutely need to print it.
If I generate a document, I leave it in electronic form unless I need to physically sign it (such as a contract) or take it to a client meeting (since many of my clients have not embraced the paperless way). This is not just Microsoft Office documents, but any document including things such as invoices, which I generate from my accounting software (QuickBooks) directly as a PDF and email to clients: I keep a copy of the PDF invoice, but it is never in paper form in my office. Services such as Freshbooks pride themselves on offering electronic invoicing, but you don’t need to switch if you’re happy with what you have, just install a good PDF generator and send it via email.
If something is in paper form but I can get the electronic version instead, I do. Although my bank doesn’t provide electronic bank statements for commercial accounts, many other banks and service providers do. Most of my monthly expenses receipts, including travel and telecommunications, arrive in PDF, since most airlines, hotels and car rentals will email a receipt to you if you ask. My most common question at a client site when they hand me a huge printed document or presentation is “can I get that in electronic form”?”
As a last resort, if I receive something in paper form (or have to print it in order to sign it), I scan it and shred the paper as soon as possible. This is the crux of most document imaging projects, but in reality is a fairly minor part these days if you do most of your communication electronically and can keep paper out of the mix altogether. Yes, it’s legal (more on that below). Since my volume is very low, I use an inexpensive Epson scanner that I picked up at Costco, and the software that came with it. That’s fine for a few pages a day, but anything more than 10 pages at a time gets tedious because it doesn’t have a sheet feeder. I would highly recommend a sheet feeder if you have a backlog of paper to convert, or if you regularly receive large paper documents. For smaller receipts when I’m travelling, I snap a photo with my iPhone, back it up to the cloud, then destroy the paper document.
I use automated backup to replicate everything offsite. This eliminates the risk of losing documents, and allows me to access documents from my netbook when I’m travelling.
I use online backup/sync services for shared content management when I collaborate on a project with other small firms and independents. Even if I were working with people in the same office, I would use the same methods since there’s no need to own your own servers.
I manually maintain retention policies on the electronic documents, and delete them appropriately. In Canada, that means I need to keep all corporate and tax-related documents for six years past the end of the fiscal year: I just deleted my 2006 files and shredded the paper files, since that was the last year that I kept any paper records. For any files with a retention policy, I keep them in dated folders so that I can quickly purge them without having to search through files; this means a bit of electronic reorganization at the year end, but it takes only a few minutes.

The result: I have no paper files in my office, except for a small pile in my in-tray waiting to be scanned. No filing cabinets, no boxes of documents in storage. As an added bonus, I have offsite backup, which most people with paper files don’t.

Quelling the nay-sayers:

“I don’t like to read on a screen”. Get a bigger/better screen, or dual monitors, and a tablet for taking it with you. Cheaper in the long run.
“It’s not secure”. Back everything up offsite, not just locally, in case of a physical disaster (fire/flood/theft). I use Jungle Disk (a division of RackSpace), which encrypts my data on the desktop, then uploads it to an encrypted Amazon S3 bucket. I hold the key, not them, so they can’t decrypt my data. My backup runs automatically, so I don’t need to do anything to make this happen.
“It’s too hard to create electronic documents”. Get a good PDF printer/document assembly application. I use CutePDF Pro, which allows me not only to generate PDFs from any application that can print, but also to assemble multiple PDFs into a single document, rearrange pages and other functions. This is useful when I need to append a timesheet to an invoice before sending to a client, or to concatenate all of my expense receipts to attach to a monthly expense report.
“I can find things easier in my filing system”. Easier than searching through full-text documents? I don’t think so, unless you have a really trivial number of files. Learn how to use search capabilities of your desktop environment (built into Windows, for example), install a third-party search utility, or (if your company is large enough) use a shared content management system.
“I need to keep these paper documents for legal/regulatory reasons”. Probably not. Most government taxation bodies have long accepted digital copies (scans of paper, or original digital documentation such as an invoice received as a PDF) in place of paper – what they refer to as “electronic record keeping”. You can see the Canada Revenue Agency’s take on this at http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/bsnss/tpcs/kprc/menu-eng.html, and similar policies exist for the IRS and other agencies. The Canada Labour Code has similar requirements for human resources records. You may need to research for your type of documents in your jurisdiction, but electronic record-keeping is most likely allowed.

If you’re starting from ground zero of a paper explosion, this might seem a bit daunting. Keep in mind that you can do this on a day-forward basis, since many of your old paper files can be shredded as they pass their 6th birthday: just go paperless starting today (or from the beginning of your fiscal year) and let the old paper cycle out over time. If you really love it and want to get ambitious, you can start doing some back scanning, but it may not be worth it. When I started in 2007, I was already keeping everything electronically that originated that way, but added in scanning of expense receipts (my biggest single paper volume) and government documents, which was not a big change. I still didn’t start scanning contracts for another few years, since they’re big and I don’t have a sheet feeder, but eventually went back and scanned all of the old ones just to clean out the last of the paper files.

A lot of these ideas, of course, are not limited to small business, but form the core of any ECM initiative. Things get more complex when you add in automated business processes to move those documents around between people, but the basic concepts, motivations and nay-saying are the same.

Selecting A Business Process Maturity Model

Several months ago, I participated in a research survey about business process maturity models, conducted by Amy Van Looy of Ghent University. It was pretty interesting, since I haven’t worked all that much with formal BPMM, and the incredible number of them available was astonishing. She sent me some additional information on her research and the models that were being considered, then yesterday, I received a link to an online tool that she and her colleagues have created for selecting a BPMM.

It takes about 25 minutes to go through the 14 questions, and will present you with a short list of business process maturity models (from the 60 included in their research out of an original field of 69) that might fit your organization. If you’re thinking about adopting a maturity model to help you gain better control over your business process improvement efforts, this is definitely worth a look (and it’s free).

Appian Version 7 – It’s All About Social

Appian’s V7 is available for customer download this week, having been used by some initial customers as early as last month, and internally at Appian since October, but they don’t plan a big marketing push until the new year. However, I was able to listen in on a webinar for their customers yesterday that described the main new features. Given Appian’s forward-thinking Tempo collaboration interface as well as their recent push on the “worksocial” (a.k.a. enterprise social) theme, it’s no surprise that this release is focused on new social features in the product.

The Appian product vision around social enterprise is to improve communication and collaboration for better knowledge sharing and decision-making, thereby making for less wasted time and resources: not fundamentally different from any social enterprise software vendor, but fairly advanced for a BPM vendor. In order to reduce friction in moving to these social methods, they are focused on creating no/low-training user interfaces on existing applications, with the goal to expand the user base for these applications. That’s possible by mimicking consumer social interfaces and paradigms with which most people are already familiar, such as they see on Twitter and Facebook, but using that to allow people to interact with their daily work. We’re seeing trends in social enterprise software to become more deeply integrated with work: in this case, Appian is building from the other direction, adding social enterprise interfaces to their robust process applications. As they put it, they’re bringing work (context and accountability) and social (participation and speed) together.

All that vision and philosophy aside, here’s the features that you can expect in the new V7 interface; I’ll make analogies to consumer social software to make it a bit easier to visualize. I’ll start with the four types of interactions that you can create, view and collaborate on in V7: posts, messages, tasks and kudos.

Posts. The Tempo UI in V6 has the concept of posting messages, but required targeting specific groups. In V7, you can post messages without a specific recipient, meaning that they are visible to everyone who follows you, as well as in searches. Anyone who can see a post can comment on it, not just the recipients.

That implies, of course, that you can now also follow a person, not just a process feed as in V6.

This is similar to posting messages on Twitter, or (to a more limited extent) on your Facebook timeline: you just throw the comment out there without addressing it to anyone in particular. If someone sees it and wants to add a comment or response, they can. The threaded conversation interface is more like Facebook visually, but allows anyone (not just your followers) to add a response.

Messages. This is more like V6 posting, in that you post to specific users or groups. As long as those messages are not locked, they are visible to (and can be commented on) your followers plus anyone through searching, and will be visible to the recipients even if they do not follow you. If a message is locked, it can be seen only by the sender and recipients.

Unlocked messages are similar to @replies in Twitter, where they will show up in the person’s activity stream even if they don’t follow you, or a Facebook post where you have added a person to the post. Locked messages are private, so similar to Twitter direct messages or Facebook messages. Or email, which is a bit of what you’re trying to get away from.

Tasks. Social tasks is a completely new feature in Appian, and allows any user to create and assign a task to someone else, without any predefined process model. These will appear in the recipient’s task list, and are only visible to the sender and recipient. They can only be direct to a single recipient, not a group or list of users. The sender and recipient can use the task as a mini collaboration, each adding comments, and either can mark the task as closed.

Although not stated in their product vision, I expect that we will see a lot of enhancement to this functionality throughout 2013 as Appian tries to address – somewhat belatedly – the ad hoc/case management market. They need to consider deadlines, assignment to more than one recipient and a few other features to make them useful.

This type of feature isn’t in consumer social software, but is available as standalone functionality in social task platforms such as Asana and do, both of which are focused on reducing email and improving collaboration as well as organizing tasks.

Kudos. A kudos is a way to provide social recognition to individuals. Similar to public posts, kudos are seen by followers of either the sender or receiver, and discoverable through search. Anyone can add a comment to a kudos. There are also analytics in V7 to be able to aggregate kudos information, although I’m not sure of the details on this or their vision for how it might be used. I can imagine that a count of kudos per person or team could provide input to performance reviews in some way, although systems like this could be gamed in larger organizations.

[For those of you who note my treatment of “kudos” as both singular and plural in the last paragraph, it’s grammatically correct, although weird.]

A kudos is similar, although not identical to, a Facebook Like: a kudos is not linked to a specific activity, but a general positive comment about a person.

Also new in the V7 interface are some different views on information: the main tabs are News (where all of the above interaction types are created), Tasks and Actions. The News tab includes a Participating filter, where you can see all of your own posts, posts that you comments on, direct messages to/from you, and kudos to/from you. This could potentially be a lot of information if you’re very active, and I believe (although didn’t see) that it can be filtered by the different interaction types. There might be some lessons to gain from Twitter on this one: Twitter’s web interface provides a Connect tab for all public interactions (follows, retweets, @replies) and a separate Me tab that includes direct (private) messages. Getting this view right is critical to user participation, and I look forward to seeing a more in-depth look at the functionality.

In the Appian V7 Tasks tab, you can see and interact with tasks that were created by or assigned to you, but it appears that you can’t create a new task here: that’s done in the News tab, where all interactions are created. You can, however, add comments to any of the existing tasks, or close it while adding a comment. This seems to be a general inbox, not just for social tasks: if you’re a participant in a regular Appian process application, your tasks will appear here, or if you’re following a process, notifications will appear here; since this was a public webinar rather than an individual briefing, I didn’t have time to clarify all of this, so I could be misinterpreting what I saw. There are separate views for tasks assigned to you and those sent to you, and you can filter by status (open/closed). As I mentioned above, I think that tasks are one of the areas where we’ll see a lot of new development coming up from Appian: definitely a bit of work to be done here although it provides basic task functionality.

The last big thing that we saw was the new profiles feature, that can display a pop-up contact card and provide access to full profile information. This is available from wherever that user appears in the News and Tasks activity streams: hover over the user name to see the contact information card pop-up, including a Follow button, or click through to their full profile including posts and kudos.

There are some new features for designers and administrators in this version, although those seem minor in comparison with the new social user interface roll-out: platform support changes, and some configuration changes no longer require a server restart. As I mentioned above, there are new metrics for kudos and social tasks, plus metrics for process models.

As organizations migrate from V6 to V7, the V6 portal interface will remain available, but the V7 social portal will be available as well. They didn’t discuss use cases for the new versus old portal, such as specific features that are not supported in V7 or better viewed in V6, but I assume that having two portal styles on the same applications means that occasional users (who don’t have in-depth training) and power users could participate in the same applications using two different interfaces.

They also mentioned their mobile strategy, which is to provide tools to develop process applications once, but deploy to multiple platforms that are optimized for each device – that means native apps rather than web interfaces on mobile devices.

If you’re using Appian in the cloud, you’ll see an upgrade to V7 with its new features and interface in late January. Other features, as yet unspecified, will be released quarterly for both on-premise and cloud versions throughout 2013.

Webinar On BPM And Operational Efficiency

This seems to be the month for webinars: after last week’s session on case management, I’m presenting a webinar on BPM for operational efficiency and process improvement, sponsored by Lexmark, coming up on Wednesday at noon Eastern; you can sign up for it here. A speaker from Lexmark will be joining me on the webinar for a short bit about their products, but most of it will be me talking about the new face of operational efficiency, which includes things such as flexible processes, informational context, predictive analytics and more.

From the abstract:

Do barriers to operational efficiency prevent your business from reaching growth targets? Do manual processes create gaps that prevent data from becoming available to users who need it? Every day, missed productivity opportunities add up to steady – and serious – losses in efficiency. When it takes longer to get work done, your business performance suffers.

Smart workflow automation is the answer to regaining everyday productivity. It can compensate for smaller workforces, safeguard against human error, and automate tedious reporting and compliance tasks. Smart, optimized workflow eliminates the common obstacles and frustrating gaps that get in the way of sustained efficiency:

Manual, paper-based processes drain productivity
Large amounts of unavailable but necessary information
Inflexible workflow that is costly and difficult to change

New Toys

For those of you who see me at conferences occasionally, you may see a new (and even smaller) setup in front of me next time: my Google Nexus 7 tablet (which I carry with me anyway as an ebook reader and general media device) and a new Logitech Tablet Keyboard for Android, plus the WordPress Android app for offline (or online) composition. Although the combined weight of the keyboard, case and tablet is probably about the same as the netbook, I am currently carrying both the netbook and the tablet when I travel, so this will lighten things up slightly. Also, it’s less bulky, and the keyboard can be tucked into my suitcase with the tablet in my handbag, meaning less weight over my arm rather than rolling along behind. One question is whether I will have to pull out the keyboard for separate security scanning at airports, where I currently have to take out my netbook but not my tablet.

The keyboard is really good: the keys have plenty of space — at least as big as my netbook, I think — and good feel and travel, so I can touch-type without a problem. The keyboard case, which protects it during travel, props up and doubles as a tablet stand. There are a few things I haven’t figured out how to do yet, such as moving forward/back by a word at a time rather than a character (shift+left/right arrow on a regular Windows keyboard), but everything else is in just the right place. Obviously, I can also just touch the screen to reposition the cursor.

The remaining challenge is what to do when I have to give a presentation, since I usually present from my own device to include any last-minute edits. Kingsoft Office (a free Android app for viewing and editing Office documents) seems to work fine for my travel writing needs including lightweight PowerPoint editing, with the added bonus that it integrates seamlessly with documents on Dropbox, where I keep my travelling files, but there’s no way to hook this baby up to a projector, as far as I know.

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.