2013 WfMC Global Awards for Excellence in Case Management

Press Releases: Award Winners 2013  |   Award Finalists 2013
Published Case Studies: "Empowering Knowledge Workers"
Download 2013 Press Release PDF
Awards 2013 Slides

• Axle Group Holdings Ltd., nominated by EmergeAdapt
• CargoNet AS, nominated by Computas AS
• Department of Transport, South Africa, nominated by EMC Corporation
• Directorate for the Construction of Facilities for EURO 2012, nominated by PayDox Business Software
• Fleet One, nominated by 4Spires
• Info Edge India Ltd., nominated by Newgen Software Technologies Ltd
• Norwegian Courts Administration, nominated by Computas AS
• Texas Office of the Attorney General Crime Victim Services Division, nominated by IBM
• U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), nominated by AINS, Inc.
• UBS Bank, nominated by Whitestein Technologies

These full case studies are published in "Empowering Knowledge Workers" together with the following papers:

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Where is ACM Today? Realities and Opportunities

Nathaniel Palmer, Business Process Management, Inc.

Today, more than a half-century after Drucker first coined the phrase “knowledge worker” (in 1959) the share of the workforce represented by this group has grown considerably, to as much as half of all workers by some measures. So, too, have grown investments targeting knowledge worker productivity. Yet despite this, we remain far from realizing the level of improvement seen in manual labor over the course of the last century. 
Nathaniel Palmer shares his intensive research on how knowledge work is performed and how to bridge the gap between controlled and ad hoc ACM. He explores work patterns applicable to case management and how the emergence of Adaptive Case Management represents the paradigm shift from adapting business practices to the design of IT systems, to building systems that reflect how work is actually performed.

Innovative Organizations Act Like Systems, Not Machines

Keith D Swenson, Fujitsu America

The author asks - do you conceptualize your organization as a machine? If so, you may be led down the wrong path for optimizing business processes. Machines are complicated, but truly complex systems, like an organization, a marketplace, an ecosystem, are not like machines. Evidence for this is both familiar and surprising. It is the “Enlightenment Bias” which blinds us to the true nature of organizations. For an organization to be innovative, you need to design it to be self-controlling, but not constrained to fixed predefined patterns. A new generation of tools is come to support organizations in this manner. Antifragility is a quality that emerges from an adaptive system. While it sounds crazy, there are adaptive systems all around us, and a human organization is one of those. We need to think of an organization as a system which includes both the people and the information technology.

Bottom-up Process Discovery using Knowledge Engineering Techniques

Thomas Bech Pettersen, Steinar Carlsen, Gunnar John Coll, Helle Frisak Sem, Norway

We have found acquisition techniques from knowledge engineering (KE) useful for process discovery in our work with operational Adaptive Case Management (ACM) solutions. These techniques can easily be combined with more traditional top-down approaches from the architect’s toolbox. Our overall approach uses dynamically combinable snippets of task support functionality rather than trying to create linear and static "end-to-end" processes. Events and user goals chain these snippets together. The described knowledge engineering techniques have proved useful for bottom-up discovery focusing on tasks and their actual work performance that may go hand in hand with the prototyping and development of a task support system.

Justifying ACM: Why We Need a Paradigm Shift in BPM

Ilia Bider, Paul Johannesson and Erik Perjons, Stockholm University, Sweden

This paper is devoted to understanding the needs of the enterprise of the future in the area of BPM, and analyzing whether the mainstream workflow-based systems will satisfy these needs. The analysis is done based on assumption that an essential property of the enterprise of the future is agility. The agility is understood as ability to discover changes, trends and opportunities in the dynamic world and react to them by adjusting current products, services and processes, or creating completely new ones.
The paper is structured in the following way: we start with giving a pragmatic definition of the concept of business process that will be used in the paper. Then, we analyze the properties of a business process that can be supported by a workflow-based system and discuss whether business processes of the enterprise of the future will possess these properties. After that, we give some suggestions on what type of techniques could be employed in the new generation of software to support business processes. In the last section, we summarized our findings.

Automated Guidance for Case Management: Science or Fiction?

Irina Rychkova, Manuele Kirsch-Pinheiro and Bénédicte Le Grand, University Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne, France

Humans dream about an intelligent computer assistant who would support them in critical situations thanks to its capacity to reason objectively, to take into account millions of factors and criteria and to value carefully thousands of alternatives prior to make a decision. HAL 9000, in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (IMDB 1968), is probably the most famous incarnation of such assistant. Being a fictional character, it reflects a number of great ideas of scientists from the 20th century who believed that machines one day would be capable of doing any work a man can do. Though it was shown that such a vision of computer technology is too optimistic, scientists keep working on theories and prototypes that can support practitioners in agile decision-making and smart process management.
In this paper, we propose our vision of what academic research can do for such a pragmatic and experience-driven discipline as Adaptive Case Management and to discuss to what extent fiction may become reality in what we call automated guidance for case management?

Identity Management via ACM

Keith Harrison-Broninski, Role Modellers

Despite the current fast pace of innovation in Identity Management, new technologies still provide little support for securing the primary occupation of most knowledge workers - collaboration with colleagues, especially those in other organizations.  If an organization is going to grant access to business-critical resources, it needs to know why access is needed and what will be done with those resources.  This means understanding the work item that has caused the person to request access – i.e., the business process context in which access is being granted:

• The Activities the person is carrying out using the resource;

• The Roles they have been assigned, to which the Activities belong;

• The Plans (projects, programmes, processes, initiatives, ventures…) of which the Roles form a part.

This paper discusses an ACM technique that not only enhances traditional Role-Based Access Control for use with collaborative work spanning multiple organizations, but also solves a related challenge into the bargain.  Increasingly, business systems are used to send messages, by email and other means, often containing sensitive content.  The sender may be known, but what about the recipients?  The ACM technique presented streamlines and improves collaborative work across multiple organizations in such a way that not only the sender but also the recipients of any message are automatically authenticated, authorized and audited.

Mastering Knowledge Flow: Aligning Social Network, Knowledge Use and Process Design

Alberto Manuel, Process Sphere

Our society is constructed around flows: flows of capital, flows of information, flows of technology, organizational interaction, flows of data. This construction is also applied inside of organizations and among its stakeholders. Flows are the sequence of interaction between physically disjointed positions held by social actors that belong or interact with organizations. These flows are what organizations are made off.
Classic analysis methods can only work in predefined or controlled environments, because organizations live in a world where interdependence, self-organization and emergence are agility, adaptability and flexibility. It is a networked composed world in the design of collaborative-networked organizations. This networked configurations comes to the composition of complex systems, from cells, to society and enterprises (associations of individuals, technology and products). In those complex systems, characteristics of emergence, order and self-organization, develop a set of network interdependent actions not visible in the individual parts. This is the reason why defining methods to analyze a domain fail if the domain and the parts change, which is what most of the times occurs once we are living in a world of variety.
In this paper you will learn how to tackle the challenge that organizations must be able to align network structure to the process type being executed and evolve the network type according to circumstances. Organizations that manage to better align these three perspectives: social network, knowledge nature and process design, are those that will be ahead in terms of execution capabilities, flexibility and adaptation to change.