How Case Management and Knowledge Brokering Can Deliver Process Improvement for Your Organization

By Deb Miller (@DebsG360) Jun 6, 2011

Case management is proving to be an important means of delivering process improvement to solve critical business challenges, regardless of industry or type of process. Just a few examples include Chartis Insurance accelerating their loan application and underwriting response time, AEGON Financial Services improving their invoice processing, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reducing costs of responding to information requests. While these examples are widely different, they share some common characteristics. This opens the opportunity to learn and leverage not just from other company best practices in your industry, but also from those in completely different industries — a core principle of “knowledge brokering.”

Patterns of Work

Case management is on the rise because traditional business process management technology puts process automation as the focal point, but knowledge work does not always have a predefined process. Case management can use data as a focal point for business improvement, delivering information that helps knowledge workers deal with complex unstructured process areas. Other examples of cases to be managed include a patient record, a lawsuit, an insurance claim, a new bank account, a disputed order, or a contract. Throughout all of these examples the common theme is the need for human judgment based on relevant information in order to make progress — to solve problems, quickly make the right decisions and take action.

Case management is a pattern of work that’s highly dynamic, in which a group of people systematically collaborate in structured and ad-hoc ways on a case folder using business process management, document management and collaboration tools."¹ – Connie Moore, Forrester Research Inc.

Forrester Research has identified three case categories that have common characteristics in their recently published The Forrester Wave Dynamic Case Management Q1 2011 research report:

Investigative — driven by the need for greater transparency
Service Requests — focused on improving human communications
Incident Management — cases triggered by events

For each of these, the case management approach is to amplify rather than replace human collaboration in the respective cases patterns to improve productivity, process efficiency, and business outcomes.

Adaptive Processes

The other common theme in case management patterns of work is the notion of adaptive processes. Case management enables knowledge workers to interact with information and perform work in their own unique ways to best respond to changing circumstances. In effect, to deal with business as it happens. This is one of the distinctive elements of adaptive case management — the concept that the process participants are involved in defining specific actions for a case in response to the course it takes. Instead of modeling the entire business process ahead of time, you have an environment that supports access to information as needed to achieve the goal.

Allowing a case worker to make their own determination about what needs to be done and when to achieve the goal — for example, tracking deadlines, referencing documents, incorporating people’s responses — is critically important. To enable this autonomy, you can have a case that triggers three or four or a dozen different processes, all running at the same time, doing different kinds of activities, and all applied back to that same case.

Knowledge Brokering Holds Promise

While vertical industry context is critical to meaningful process improvements, the notion of case management as a pattern of work opens the door to faster improvements through “knowledge brokering.”

As defined by McKinsey, knowledge brokering is a systematic approach to seeking ideas from people in a variety of industries, disciplines and contexts and then of combining the resulting lessons in new ways.