Dynamic Case Management — An Old Idea Catches New Fire

Interest in case management has climbed higher and higher throughout 2009. Drivers include: 1) an increased need to manage the costs and risks of servicing customer requests — like loans, claims, and benefits; 2) a greater emphasis on automating and tracking inconsistent "incidents" that do not follow a well-defined process; 3) new pressure on government agencies to respond to a higher number of citizen requests; 4) new demands that regulators, auditors, and litigants place on businesses to respond to external regulations; and 5) the increased use of collaboration and social media to support unstructured business processes. Business process management (BPM) and enterprise content management (ECM) suites alone are insufficient for dynamic case management, but the convergence of BPM, ECM, business analytics, and event processing will breathe new life into case management. Lean initiatives to improve business processes will also shine a spotlight on case management. These forces will push document-centric BPM suites toward packaged case management offerings, and this new category of software will emerge as a distinct market by 2013.