20 years-ago I was a caseworker in a central government department. So, for me, talking about case management, it is easy to think of paper “case files”. These were cardboard folders that would typically hold all correspondence, reference documents, decisions, minutes on the decision-making process; everything that you needed to know regarding the “case”.
Nowadays, many of these “cases” have been digitised so this information is now stored in computer systems. Theoretically, it should be easy to find out what I need, as it is in a system. But not all systems are easy to use and sometimes the information can be difficult to retrieve…
Moreover, the definition that I supplied for a case, doesn’t really describe digital case management holistically.
A case is not just the elements that I mentioned above. Sure, all of these are important facets of a case, but case management is also about the process from gathering some data (maybe through the use of an on-line form) and its journey to an eventual outcome.
Along the case-working journey several other factors need to be considered. Ownership of the case, at any particular time, authorities for decision making, actions may need to be configured, notifications when a particular trigger is encountered; all of these are important facets of the workflow surrounding the case, and all are components of the overall casework activity.
On an enterprise level, case management is the key component that coordinates complex human and machine work from end-to-end, to deliver and drive the outcomes that you and your customers require. Moreover, it needs to be capable of dynamically handling any exceptions to those intended outcomes along the way.
A case essentially represents work that an organisation performs to achieve an outcome. For example, processing a parking permit application is a critical piece of work that needs to be done to deliver the desired outcome to your customer. In this example, a parking permit!
Lots of actions and processes, planned and unplanned, may be performed to complete the work and deliver the outcome defined by the case. Most cases are made up of multiple tasks and processes that drive the case toward its outcome.
When defining a case management workflow, it’s useful to visualise the business process as a set of discrete steps. Looking at some of the solutions that we have delivered for our clients, like applying for a parking permit, or raising a case about someone being made homeless, or applying for special education needs transport, all of these activities have defined cases with stages and steps driven by case management.
Think of a case as being a digital folder that includes all the actions, documents, and data needed to drive the case towards an outcome. But it’s better than just a digital folder. A case also contains the intelligence to retrieve the information you need, drive the processes you want, manage escalations, exceptions, detect changes, make the decisions needed to achieve the outcome, and to record each step in the progress of each case.
That is what is meant by the management aspect of case management. It is much more than just tracking actions; it drives the casework towards an outcome.
Case management is a software-based approach to helping people accomplish daily work and automating work from end-to-end. As part of a true intelligent automation platform, the case is at the centre and is used to manage and coordinate actions, outcomes, and other related sub-cases, all with the goal of completing a journey and delivering a business outcome.
At datb we offer a composable case management solution. Composability is a system design principle that deals with the inter-relationships of components. A highly composable system provides components that can be selected and assembled in various combinations to satisfy specific user requirements.
The composable case management module contained in our platform works around three composable elements; the person (or citizen, student, etc), resources and the services they provide.
Composable case management is an integral component to our industry-focused solutions for central and local government and in higher education. However, it is not limited to just these industries; case management is in just about every business. It is quite possible that you just hadn’t recognised what you do as case management…
