There’s been some buzz in the market lately about Advanced Case Management (ACM) technology products. Just what do the suppliers mean by this? Is it just buzz, or does ACM make sense in certain applications for your own organization?
First, a definition. ACM is information technology that exposes structured and unstructured business information (business data and content) and allows structured (business) and unstructured (social) organizations to execute work (routine and emergent processes) in a secure but transparent manner.
We at Doculabs see the new ACM offerings involving three distinctive paradigm shifts:
- ACM is a productive system that deploys not only the organization and process structure, but through backend interfaces becomes the system of record for the business data entities and content involved. All processes are completely transparent as per access authorization and are fully auditable.
- ACM enables non-technical business users in virtual organizations to seamlessly create/consolidate processes from business entities, content, social interactions, and business rules. ACM can be unstructured or strict.
- ACM moves the process of knowledge-gathering in the lifecycle from the template analysis/modeling/simulation phase into the process execution. The ACM system collects actionable knowledge based on process patterns created by business users.
Think of it as business process management (BPM) for knowledge workers or for variable processes (or both).
Right now, the market for ACM includes COTS vertical applications such as judicial case management, or customer service (e.g. for escalation to Tier 2 or Tier 3 customer service cases), but the trend is toward platform-focused COTS ACM applications – i.e. solutions with broad ACM functionality, capable of being adapted via coding or configuration to a wide range of processes and process areas – e.g. audit investigations or HR (for hiring and employee onboarding). Finally, for organizations with mature, successful BPM programs, another platform-oriented approach is to add an ACM overlay to the existing BPM platform, to extend its functionality.
For further insight into whether you have applications that could benefit from ACM, register for our upcoming webinar, “Everything You Wanted to Know about Advanced Case Management, But Were Afraid to Ask,” on Thursday, May 19, 2011.