The nice thing about IBM Case Manager (shortened to ICM in some of their material, and ACM in others) being so new is that you can show up late to the technical product briefing and not miss anything, since the product managers spend the first 10 15 minutes re-explaining what case management and ICM are to the crowd of legacy FileNet customers. (Yes, it’s been a long day.)

This session with Dave Yockelson and Jake Lavirne discussed some of the customers that they have gained since last year’s initial product release, including banking, insurance, government and energy industry examples. They listed the integrated/bundled products that make up ICM (CM, BPM, ILOG, etc.) plus those things created specifically for ICM (case object model, task object model, case analytics) and the ease with which it is used as a framework for solution construction.

The upcoming release, v5.1, will be available within the next month or so, and includes a number of new features based on feedback from the early customers:

• Enhanced case design, including improved data integration, enhanced widget customization, solution templates, and separate solution project areas. Specifically, the data integration framework allows data from a third-party system of record to be used directly in the ICM UI or as case metadata.
• Direct IBM CM8 integration, with the CM8 documents staying in CM8 without requiring repository federation. This means that CM8 content can initiate cases and launch tasks, as well as being used natively in tasks, completely transparently to the case worker.
• Improved case worker user experience, including integration of IBM Forms (in addition to the existing support for FileNet eForms) in the ICM UI for adding cases, adding tasks, or viewing task details. This provides a relatively easy way to replace the standard UI with a richer forms-based interface for the case worker. There will also be a simplified UI layout, resizing and custom theming, and the ability to email and share direct links to a case. A case can also be split to multiple cases.
• Improved support for IBM BPM, including tighter design-time integration, universal inbox, and support for Business Space.

The session wrapped up with a review of some of the vertical applications built on ICM by partners or GBS. There are a number of IBM partners working on ICM applications; I’m sure that a lot of partners weren’t thrilled to find out that IBM had essentially made much of their custom work obsolete, but this does provide an opportunity for partners to build vertical solutions much more quickly based on the ICM framework.

Feri Clayton gave an update on the ECM product portfolio and roadmap, in a bit more depth than yesterday’s Bisconti/Murphy ECM product strategy session. She reinforced the message that the products are made up of suites of capabilities and components, so that you’re not using different software silos. I’m not sure I completely buy into IBM’s implementation of this message as long as there are still quite different design environments for many of these tools, although they are making strides in consolidating the end user experience.

She showed the roadmap for what has been released in 2011, plus the remainder of this year and 2012: on the BPM side, there will be a 5.1 release of both BPM and Case Manager in Q4, which I’ll be hearing more about in separate BPM and Case Manager product sessions this afternoon. The new Nexus UI will previous in Q4, and be released in Q2 of 2012. There’s another Case Manager release projected for Q4 2012.

There was a question about why BPM didn’t appear in the ECM portfolio diagram, and Clayton stated that “BPM is now considered part of Case Manager”. Unlike the BPM vendors who think of ACM as a part of BPM, I think that she’s right: BPM (that is, structured process management that you would do with IBM FileNet BPM) is a functionality within ACM, not the other way around.

She went through the individual products in the portfolio, and some of the updates:

• Production Imaging and Capture now includes remote capture, which is nice for organizations that don’t want to centralize their scanning/capture. It’s not clear how much of this is the Datacap platform versus the heritage FileNet Capture, but I imagine that the Datacap technology is going to be driving the capture direction from here on. They’ve integrated the IBM Classification Module for auto recognition and classification of documents.
• Content Manager OnDemand (CMOD) for report storage and presentment will see a number of enhancements including CMIS integration.
• Social Content Management uses an integration of IBM Connections with ECM to allow an ECM library to access and manage content from within Connections, display ECM content within a Connections Community and a few other cross-product integrations. There are a couple of product announcements about this, but they seem to be in the area of integration between Connections and ECM as opposed to adding any native social content management to ECM.
• FileNet P8, the core content management product, had a recent release (August) with such enhancements as bidirectional replication between P8 and Image Services, content encryption, and a new IBM-created search engine (replacing Verity).
• IBM Content Manager (a.k.a., the product that used to compete with P8) has a laundry list of enhancements, although it still lags far behind P8 in most areas.

We had another short demo of Nexus, pretty much the same as I saw yesterday: the three-pane UI dominated by an activity stream with content-related events, plus panes for favorites and repositories. They highlighted the customizability of Nexus, including lookups and rules applied to metadata field entry during document import, plus some nice enhancements to the content viewer. The new UI also includes a work inbasket for case management tasks; not sure if this also includes other types of tasks such as BPM or even legacy Content Manager content lifecycle tasks (if those are still supported).

Nexus will replace all of the current end-user clients for both content and image servers, providing a rich and flexible user experience that is highly customizable and extensible. They will also be adding more social features to this; it will be interesting to see how this develops as they expand from a simple activity stream to more social capabilities.

Clayton then moved on to talk about ACM and the Case Manager product, which is now coming up to its second release (called v5.1, naturally). Given that much of the audience probably hasn’t seem it before, she wen through some of the use cases for Case Manager across a variety of industries. Even more than the base content management, Case Manager is a combination of a broad portfolio of IBM products within a common framework. She listed some of the new features, but I expect to see these in more detail in this afternoon’s dedicated Case Manager session so will wait to cover them then.

She discussed FileNet P8 BPM version 5.x: now Java-based for significant performance and capacity improvements (also due to a great deal of refactoring to remove old code sludge, as I have heard). As I wrote about last month, it provides Linux and zLinux support, and also allows for multi-tenancy.

With only a few minutes to go, she whipped through information lifecycle governance (records and retention management), including integration of the PSS Atlas product; IBM Content Collector; and search and content analytics. Given the huge focus on analytics in the morning keynote, it’s kind of funny that it gets about 30 seconds at the end of this session.

Content at rest = cost

Content in motion = value

That was the message that kicked off the ECM keynote, then Kevin Painter took the stage to introduce the winners of the four ECM customer innovation awards – Novartis, Tejon Ranch, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Wells Fargo – before turning things over to Doug Hunt.

IBM defines unstructured data, or content, as pretty much everything that doesn’t fit in a database table. Traditionally, this type of information is seen as inaccessible, cumbersome, expensive, unmanageable and risky by business, IT, records managers and legal. However, with the right management of that content, including putting it into motion to augment systems of record, it can become accessible and relevant, providing a competitive advantage.

We heard from Wells Fargo about their ECM implementation, where they are moving from having scanned documents as merely an archival practice to having those documents be an active part of the business transactions. [This sounds just like moving from post-processing scanning to pre-processing scanning and workflow, which we’ve been doing for 30+ years, but maybe it’s more complex than that.] For them, ECM is a fundamental part of their mortgage processing architecture and business transaction enabling, supporting multiple lines of business and processes. This, I think, is meant to represent the “Capture” slice of the pie.

Novartis was on stage next to talk about their records management (the “Govern” slice), particularly around retention management of their records to reduce legal risk across their multi-national organization.

Next, Hunt addressed “Analyze” with content analytics, joined by someone from Seton Healthcare to discuss how they’re using Watson analytics to proactively identify certain high-risk patients with congestive heart failure to allow early treatment that can reduce the rate of hospital readmissions. With 80% of their information being unstructured, they need something beyond standard analytics to address this.

Case management was highlighted as addressing the “Activate” slice, and Hunt was joined by someone from SEB, a Nordic bank, to discuss how they are using IBM Case Manager as an exception handling platform (i.e., for those processes that kick out of the standard straight-through process), replacing their existing workflow engine.

Hunt did briefly address the “Socialize” slice, but he was so clued out about anything to do with social content, it was a bit embarrassing. Seriously, I don’t want to hear the executive in charge of IBM’s ECM strategy talk about social as something that his wife and kids do, but he doesn’t.

He finished up talking about the strength of the IBM ECM industry accelerators and business partners, both of which help to get systems up and running at their customers’ sites as quickly as possible.

Dave Yockelson from ECM product marketing and Amy Dickson from IBM BPM product management talked about something that I’m sure is on the minds of all FileNet customers who are doing anything with process: how do the (FileNet-based) Case Manager and Content Manager fit together with the WebSphere BPM products?

They started with a description of the IBM BPM portfolio – nothing new here – and how ACM requires an integrated approach that addresses repeatable patterns. Hmmmm, not completely sure I agree with that. Yockelson went through the three Forrester divisions of case management from their report on the ACM space, then went through a bit more detail on IBM Case Manager (ICM) and how it knits together functionality from the entire IBM software portfolio: content, collaboration, workflow, rules, events, integration, and monitoring and analytics. He positioned it as a rapid application development environment for case-based solutions, which is probably a good description. Dickson then went through IBM BPM (the amalgam of Lombardi and WebSphere Process Server that I covered at Impact), which she promised would finish up the “background” part and allow them to move on to the “better together” part.

So, in the aforementioned better together area:

• Extend IBM BPM processes with content, using document and list widgets that can be integrated in a BPM application. This does not include content event processes, e.g., spawning a specific process when a document event such as check-in occurs, so is no different than integrating FileNet content into any BPMS.
• Extend IBM BPM Advanced (i.e., WPS) processes with content through a WebSphere CMIS adapter into the content repository. Ditto re: any BPMS (or other system) that supports CMIS being able to integrate with FileNet content.
• Invoke an IBM BPM Advanced process from an ICM case task. Assuming that this is via a web service call (since WPS allows processes to be exposed as web services), not specifically an IBM-to-IBM integration.

Coming up, we’ll see some additional integration points:

• Invoke an IBM BPM Express/Standard process from an ICM case task. This, interestingly, implies that you can’t expose a BPM Express/Standard process as a web service, or it could have been done without additional integration, doesn’t it? The selection of the process and mapping of case to process variables is built right into the ICM Builder, which is definitely a nice piece of integration to make it relatively seamless to integrate ICM and BPM.
• Provide a federated inbox for ICM and BPM (there was already an integrated inbox for the different types of BPM processes) so that you see all of your tasks in a single list, based on the Business Space Human Tasks widget. When you click on a task in the list, the appropriate widgets are spawned to handle that type of work.
• Interact with ICM cases directly from a BPM process through an integration service that allows cases to be created, retrieved and updated (metadata only, it appears) as part of a BPM process.

This definitely fits IBM’s usual modus operandi of integrating rather than combining products with similar functionality; this has a lot of advantages in terms of reducing the time to releasing something that looks (sort of) like a single product, but has some disadvantages in the underlying software complexity as I discussed in my IBM BPM review from Impact. A question from the audience asked about consolidation of the design environment; as expected, the answer is “yes, over time”, which is similar to the answer I received at Impact about consolidation of the process engines. I expect that we’ll see a unified design environment at some point for ICM and both flavors of BPM by pulling ICM design into the Process Center, but there might still be three engines under the covers for the foreseeable future. Given the multi-product mix that makes up ICM, there will also be separate engines (and likely design environments) for non-process functions such as rules, events and analytics, too; the separate engines are inevitable in that case, but there could definitely be some better integration on the design side.

From a white paper that I’m working on now:

I think that the whole “BPM versus ACM” debate has completely blown out of all sensible proportion, when we’re really talking about a spectrum of functionality that ranges from structured process management (or what some people think of as BPM) to completely dynamic process management.

The key, to me, is that it’s not an either-or situation: almost every business process that I’ve ever seen lies somewhere in the middle, with both structured and dynamic aspects: in some cases, different workers may perform either highly structured or highly dynamic functions, depending on their role. We need both end of the spectrum – and everything in between – to manage our processes, and we need them to work together in a cohesive environment.

I’ll publish the link to the white paper, which explains this concept in a lot more detail, when it’s complete.

I had an update from Pegasystems on their case management offering a while ago, and with the publication of the new Forrester Wave on Dynamic Case Management, the time is right for a quick summary. After last year’s PegaWorld, I published a review of their SmartBPM V6, which was already shipping with Visual Case Manager, but they’ve stepped up the case management functionality since then and have scored a top spot in Forrester’s report (you can see the wave graphic at Pega’s site, and download the report for free after registration).

They have a new portal for case workers and managers, and have improved the ad hoc process design that I saw in last review. There are a number of other enhancements, including some vertical applications, but we focused on the case management core functionality. The Case Designer is used to create the hierarchy of subcases and tasks, including attributes such as which are required versus optional, automatic versus manual start, or have attachments. These Case Type Definitions in the Case Designer are really the heart of defining a case management application: you define the case structure as a hierarchy of subcases, tasks and rules. You can add a new task, and apply rules to the tasks to limit choices or pre-fill information. Creating a new task also creates an empty process associated with it; this can be left completely empty to allow ad hoc process definition at runtime, or a process flow can be defined, which in turn can apply rules at any point in the process. You can specify goals and deadlines at any point in the hierarchy, so SLAs can be nested.

In the insurance claims example that we saw, there was a hierarchy of subcases and tasks: at the top level, a FNOL (first notice of loss) case had subcases for Vehicle Damage and Injury, each of which could be created manually by the user; within the Vehicle Damage subcase, an Adjust task was started automatically when the parent case was created, but an Adjudicate task could be started by the user as required. Case and task definitions can be reused – in the demo, the Adjust and Adjudicate tasks appear in both the Vehicle Damage and Injury cases – which potentially reduces the amount of effort to create similar case types. I’m not really clear on the distinction between (sub)cases and tasks: they both are containers for work and appear to have the same technical functionality, just a different representation on the screen. The terminology is unclear on whether a task is an atomic bit of work done by one user, or if it can have child objects as well. Leaving the subcase/task semantics aside, this definition screen allows you to define all of the activities that might need to be done in the course of a case, and some of their attributes. Although intended for business users/analysts, I think that there’s enough technical information exposed in this environment to make it unsuitable to any but the more technically-minded BAs. Ease of use has long been an issue – or, at least, a perceived issue – for Pega; they’ve made a lot of UI improvements to their modeling suite, but it’s still going to take some technical know-how to get things working. This is true for most BPMS products, in spite of what the vendors might tell you in the demo, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing for setting up frameworks and more complex processes, although it can inhibit agility if required for any change to a process or case structure. The Pega case designer environment might be better served by presenting a perspective for less technical users and a perspective with all the gory technical details so that the non-techies aren’t intimidated by it.

Moving on to the end-user experience, the newly-designed portal has four tabs/views: Cases, Tasks, Events and Reports. The Cases view shows a list of all cases that the user owns (i.e., that this user instantiated) or has an interest in (i.e., where this user has a task or subcase assigned to them). In the demo example, the cases are all claims; over in the Tasks view, we see the list of tasks assigned to this user, although it’s not clear (to me) if this is a combination of subcases and tasks, or just tasks – back to my earlier discussion on the distinction between the two. In both views, you see the start date, urgency, deadline and status of the case or task. In the Cases view, there is also a button to create a new case; this prompts for the required information for the case, such as claimant and vehicles, and creates the case. The Events view shows a snapshot of activity on all cases, including the user and case identifier, plus a calendar of upcoming deadlines for the cases.

Viewing a case/task, the default view shows the case details and the subject details, although this can be customized since each widget on the screen has user-customizable parameters. Most of what we saw was out of the box, with the exception of the data fields in the Details widget, and the meaning of “Subject” (in this case, client and policy) for linking cases to subjects. The case details shows all of this information, plus attachments , subcases and tasks. In the subject details, which will be specific to the case type, information is shown about the subject – in our example, subjects were clients that were claimants on the case – and links provided to any related cases. This view also provides the option to start a new process associated with the open case/task. Information can be aggregated across subcases and tasks within a case, e.g., calculating a total indemnity amount on a claim as an aggregate of damage, injury and other subcases within the claim.

Users aren’t limited to just executing pre-defined case definitions, however; they can also add subcases and tasks manually to a case from the Cases view, which shows them a hierarchy similar to what they would see in the Case Designer, but without a lot of the technical underpinnings exposed. They can select a known task from a list on the main case windows, or define a completely new one; parameters for the new task allow them to specify assigned resources, a workbasket, start and end dates, whether this task requires manager approval, and whether to suspend the parent case until this task completes. Once the case has been modified, the resulting case can then be saved as a template, providing a “design by doing” approach that allows business users to create their own versions of case definitions, which can be useful for capturing exceptions that may need to be rolled into the main case definition.

The Reports view of the end-user portal shows some basic case statistics such as average duration and throughput per user; some standard reports are provided, and the user can create new reports and share them with others.

Taking a look at the Forrester report on Dynamic Case Management (DCM, or what is known in some circles as adaptive case management, or ACM) from last month, in which Pega scores a top spot, they see this still-volatile market as emerging from the human-centric BPM vendors as well as the ECM vendors, but list a number of key features that DCM requires over BPM:

• Placing the case at the center of the focus, rather than a particular process, and therefore be able to run multiple processes against a single case. In other words, instead of the usual BPM paradigm of having content (such as a case folder) being an attachment to a single process, the case folder itself is primary, and can have multiple processes and tasks associated with it simultaneously.
• Associating different types of objects with a case, including documents and other content, but also including structured data and the aforementioned processes.
• Allow users to handle variations, which allows knowledge workers to decide how a case is managed rather than having to follow a pre-defined process. This may include deciding which of a set of pre-defined tasks may be executed, as well as the ability to create completely new tasks and processes that were not envisioned by the original case designer.
• Selective restriction of changes to processes, which can manifest in a variety of ways in different DCM products. Basically, this is about compliance, and making sure that some processes and rules are always followed, even though many of the other tasks may be defined and decided by the knowledge worker. This is where structured BPM, BRM and DCM tend to overlap (and where many of the arguments about the distinction between BPM and DCM originate): in practice, many line-of-business processes have some things that just have to be done a certain way, but need to also allow for a lot of flexibility in other areas.

I had a chance to see IBM’s new Case Manager product at IOD last month, and last week Jake Levirne, the product manager, gave me a more complete demo. If you haven’t read my earlier product overview from IOD as well as the pre-IOD briefing on Case Manager and related products, the business analyst view, a quick bit on customizing the UI and the technical roundtable, you may want to do so now since I’ll try not to repeat too much of what’s there already.

Runtime

We started by going through the end-user view of an application for insurance claims. There’s a role-based portal interface, and this user role (CSR) sees a list of cases, can search for a case based on any of the properties, or add a new case – fairly standard functionality. In most cases, as we’ll see later, cases are created automatically on the receipt of a specific document type, but there needs to be the flexibility to have users create their own as well. Opening a case, the case detail view shows case data (metadata) and case information, which comprises documents, tasks and history that are contained within the case. There’s also a document viewer, reminding us that case management is content-centric; the entire view is a bit reminiscent of the previous Business Process Framework (BPF) case management add-on, which has definitely contributed to Case Manager in a philosophical sense if not any of the actual underlying technology.

For those FileNet geeks in the crowd, a case is now a native content type in the FileNet content repository, rather than a custom object type as was used in the BPF; logically, you can think of this as a case folder that contains everything related to the case. The Documents tab is pretty straightforward – a list of documents attached to the case – and the History tab shows a list of events on the case, including documents being added and tasks started/completed. The interesting part, as you might have guessed, is in the Tasks tab, which shows the tasks (small structured processes, in reality) assigned to this case, either as required or optional tasks. Tasks can be added to a case at design time or runtime; when added at runtime, these are predefined processes, although there may be customizable parameters that the user can modify, but the end user can’t change the definition of a task. This gives some flexibility to the user – they can choose whether or not to execute the optional tasks, they can execute tasks in any order, and they can add new tasks to a case – but doesn’t allow the user to create new tasks: they are always selecting from a predefined list of tasks. Depending on the task definition, tasks for their case may end up assigned to them or to someone else, or to a shared queue corresponding to a role. This results in the two lists that we saw back in the first portal view: one is a list of cases based on search criteria, and the other is a list of tasks assigned to this user or a shared queue on which they are working.

Creating a new case is fairly simple for the user: they click to add a case, and are presented with a list of instructions for filling out the initial case data, such as the date of loss and policy number in our insurance claim example. The data that can be entered using the standard metadata widget is pretty limited and the form isn’t customizable, however, and often there is an e-form included in the case that is used to capture more information. In this situation, there is a First Notice of Loss e-form that the user fills out to gather the claim data; this e-form is contained as a document in the case, but also synchronizes some of its fields with the case metadata. This ability to combine capabilities of documents, e-forms and folders has been in FileNet for quite a while, so it’s no surprise that they’re leveraging it here. It is important to note, however that this e-form would have to be designed in the Lotus forms designer, not in the Case Manager design tools: a reminder that the IBM Case Manager solution is a combination of multiple tools, not a single monolithic system. Whether this is a good or bad thing is a bit of a philosophical discussion: in the case of e-forms, for example, you may want to use this same form in other applications besides Case Manager, so it may make sense that it is defined independently, but it will require additional design skills.

Once the case is created, it will follow any initial process flows that are assigned to it, and can kick off manual tasks. For example, there could be automated activities that update a claims systems with the data captured on the FNOL form, and manual tasks created and assigned to a CSR to call the third parties’ insurance carrier. The underlying FileNet content engine has a lot of content-centric event handling baked right into it, so being able to do things such as trigger processes or other actions based on content or metadata updates have been there all along and are being used for any changes to a case or its contents.

Design Time

We moved over to the Case Manager Builder to look at how designers – business analysts, in IBM’s view – define new case types. At the highest level, you first define a “solution”, which can include multiple case types. Although the example that we went through used one case type per solution, we discussed some situations where you might want to have multiple case types in a single solution: for example, a solution for a customer service desktop, where there was a different case type defined for each type of request. Since case types within a single solution can share user interface designs, document types and properties, this can reduce the amount of design work if you plan ahead a bit.

For each solution, you define the following:

• Properties (metadata)
• Roles and the in-baskets (shared work queues) to which they have access
• Document types
• In-baskets associated with this solution
• Case types that make up this solution.

Then, for each case type within a solution, you define the following:

• The document type that will be used to trigger the creation of a case of this type, if any. Cases can be added manually, as we saw in the runtime example, or can be triggered by other events, but the heavily content-centric focus of Case Manager assumes that you might usually want to kick off a case automatically when a certain document type is added to the content repository.
• The default Add Case page, which is a link to a previously-defined page in the IBM Mashup Center that will be used as the user interface on selecting the Add Case button.
• The default Case Details page, which is a link to the Mashup Center page for displaying a case.
• Optionally, overrides for the case details page for each role, which allows different roles to see different views of the case details.
• Properties for this case type, which can be manually inherited from the solution level or defined just at this level. All solution properties are not automatically inherited by each case type, since it was felt that this would make it unnecessarily confusing, but any of the solution properties can be selected for exposure at the case level.
• The property views (subsets) that are displayed in the case summary, case details and case search views. If more than about a dozen properties are used, then IBM recommends using an e-form instead of the standard views, which are pretty limited in terms of display customization. A view can include a group of properties for visual grouping.
• Case folders to organize the content within a case.
• Tasks associated with the case, grouped by required and optional tasks. Unlike the user interfaces, document types and properties, task definitions are not shared across case types within a solution, which requires that similar or identical tasks will require redefining for each case type. This is definitely an area that they can improve in the future; if their claim of loosely-coupled cases and processes is to be fully realized, then task/process definitions should be reusable at least across case types within a solution, if not across solutions.

Although part of the case type definition, I’ll separate out the task definition for clarity. For each task within a case type, you define:

• As noted above, whether it is required or optional for this case type.
• Whether the task starts automatically or manually, or if the user optionally adds the task to the case at runtime.
• Inclusion of the task in a set. Sets provide visual grouping of tasks within a case, but also control execution: a set can be specified as all-inclusive (all tasks execute if any of the tasks execute) or mutually exclusive (only one of the tasks in the set can be executed). The mutually exclusive situation could be used to create a manner of case subtypes, instead of using multiple case types within a solution, where the differences between the subtypes are minimal.
• Preconditions for the task to execute, that is, the task triggers. In many cases, this will be the case start, but could also be when a document of a specific type is added to the case, or a case property value is updated to meet certain conditions, including combinations of property values.
• Design comments, which could be used simply as documentation, but are primarily intended for use by a non-technical business analyst who created the case type definition up to this point but wants to pass of the creation of the actual process flow to someone more technical.
• The process flow associated with this task, using the visual Step Editor. This allows the roles defined for the solution to be added as swimlanes, and the human-facing steps to be plotted out. This supports branching as well as sequential flow, but no automated steps; however, any automated steps that are added via the full Process Designer will appear in the uneditable grey lanes at the top of the Step Editor map. If you’ve used the Process Designer before, the step properties at the left of the Step Editor will appear familiar: they’re a subset of the step properties that you would see in the full Process Designer, such as step deadlines and allowing reassignment of the step to another user.

Being long acquainted with FileNet BPM, a number of my questions were around the connection between the Step Editor and the full BPM Process Designer; Levirne handled some of these, and I also had a few technical discussions at IOD that shed light on this. In short, the Step Editor creates a full XPDL process definition and stores it in the content repository, which is the same as what happens for any process definition created in the Process Designer. However, if you open this process definition with the Process Designer, it recognizes that it was created using the Case Manager Step Editor and performs some special handling. From the Process Designer, a more technical designer can add any system steps required (which will appear, but not be editable, in the Step Editor): in other words, they’ve implemented a fully shared model used by two different tools: the Case Builder Step Editor for a less technical business analyst, and the BPM Process Designer for a developer. As with any process definition, the Case Manager task process definitions must be transferred to the process engine before they can be used to instantiate new processes: this is done automatically when the solution is deployed.

Deploying a solution to a test environment is a one-click operation from the Case Manager Builder main screen, although moving that to another environment isn’t quite as easy: the new release of the P8 platform allows a Case Manager solution to be packaged in order to move it between servers, but there’s still some manual work involved.

We wrapped up with a discussion of the other IBM products that integrate with Case Manager, some easier than others:

• Case Manager includes a limited license of ILOG JRules, but it’s not integrated in the Case Manager Builder environment: it must be called as a web service from the Process Designer. There are already plans for better integration here, which is essential.
• Content Analytics for data mining and analytics on the case metadata and case content, including the content of attached documents.
• Case Analyzer, which is a version of the old BPM Process Analyzer, with enhancements to show analytics at the case level and the inclusion of custom case properties to provide a business view as well as an operational view in dashboard and reports.

They’re working on better integration between Case Manager and the the WebSphere product line, including both WebSphere Process Server and Lombardi; this will be necessary to combat the competition who have a single solution that covers the full range of BPM functionality from structured processes to completely dynamic case management.

Built on one of the best industrial-strength enterprise content management products around, IBM Case Manager will definitely see some adoption in the existing IBM/FileNet client base: adding this capability onto an existing FileNet Content Manager repository could provide a lot of value with a minimal amount of work for the customer, assuming that they actually allowed their business analysts to do the work that IBM intends them to. In spite of the power, however, there is a lack of flexibility in the runtime task definition that may make them less competitive in the open market.

There was an AIIM webinar today on supporting the information worker with case management, featuring Craig Le Clair from Forrester.

Le Clair introduced the concept of information workers, a term that they use instead of knowledge worker, defined as “everyone between 18 and 88 with a job in which they use a computer or other connected device”, which I find to be a sufficiently broad definition as to be completely useless but allows them to use the cute abbreviation iWorker. Today, however, he’s just focused on those iWorkers who are involved with case management, in other words, what the rest of us would call knowledge workers. Whatever.

Forrester uses the term dynamic case management – others use advanced or adaptive case management, but we’re talking about the same thing – to mean “a semistructured but also collaborative, dynamic, human, and information-intensive process that is driven by outside events and requires incremental and progressive responses from the business domain handling the case.” Le Clair provided a quick summary of dynamic case management, with the document-centric case file as the focus, surrounded by processes/tasks, data, events and other aspects that make up the entire history of a case. There are some business challenges now that are driving the adoption of case management, including cost and risk management for servicing customer requests, enforcing compliance in less structured processes, and support for ad hoc knowledge work. He spoke specifically about transparency in regulatory compliance situations, where case management provides a way to handle regulatory processes for maximum flexibility while still enforcing necessary rules and capturing a complete history of a case, although most customers are more focused on case management specifically for improving customer service.

He described case management as a convergence of a number of technologies, primarily ECM, BPM, analytics and user experience, although I would argue that events and rules are equally important. Dynamic allocation of work is key: a case can select which tasks that should be applied to a case, and even who should be involved, in order to reach the specified states/goals of the case. Some paths will include structured processes, others will be completely ad hoc, others may involved a task checklist. Different paths selected may trigger rules and events, or offer guidance on completion. Different views of the case may be available to different roles. In other words, case management tries to capture the flexible experience of working on a case manually, but provides a guided experience where regulations demand it, and captures a complete audit trail as well as analytics of what happened to the case.

Forrester predicts that three categories of case management will emerge – investigative, service requests and incident management (can you sense three separate Forrester Waves coming?) – focused on different aspects of customer experience, cost control and risk mitigation. Key to making these work will be integration of core customer data directly into the case management environment, both for display to a case worker as well as allowing for automated rules to be triggered based on customer data. There are some challenges ahead: IT is still leading the configuration of case management applications, and it just takes too long to make changes to the rules, process models and reporting.

He was followed by Ken Bisconti from IBM’s ECM software products group, since IBM sponsored the webinar, talking about their new Case Manager product; I wrote about what Ken and many others said about this at the IOD conference last month, and just had an in-depth briefing on the product that I will be writing about, so won’t cover his part of the presentation today.

Dave Perman and Lauren Mayes had the unenviable position of presenting at the end of the day, and at the same time as the expo reception was starting (a.k.a. “open bar”), but I wanted to round out my view of the new Case Manager product by looking at how the user interfaces are built. This is all about the Mashup Center and the Case Manager widgets; I’ve played around with the ECM widgets in the past, which provide an easy way to build a composite application that includes FileNet ECM capabilities.

Perman walked through the Case Manager Builder briefly to show how everything hangs together – or at least, the parts that are integrated into the Builder environment, which are the content and process parts, but not rules or analytics – then described the mashup environment. The composite application development (mashup) environment is pretty standard functionality in BPM and ACM these days, but Case Manager comes with a pre-configured set of pages that make it easy to build case application UIs. A business analyst can easily customize the standard Case Manager pages, selecting which widgets are included and their placement on the page, including external (non-Case Manager) widgets.

The designer can also override the standard case view pages either for all users or for specific roles; this requires creating the page in the mashup environment and registering it for use in Case Manager, then using the Case Manager Builder to assign that page to the specific actions associated with a case. In other words, the UI design is not integrated into the Case Builder environment, although the end result is linked within that environment.

Mayes then went through the process of building and integrating 3rd party widgets; there’s a lot of material on the IBM website now on how to build widgets, and this was just a high-level view of that process and the architecture of integrating between the Mashup Center and the ACM widgets, themes and ECM services on the application server. This uses lightweight REST services that return JSON, hence easier to deal with in the browser, including CMIS REST services for content access, PE REST services for process access, and some custom case-specific REST services. Since there are widgets for Sametime presence and chat functionality, they link through to a Sametime proxy server on the application server. For you FileNet developer geeks, know that you also have to have an instance of Workplace XT running on the application server as well. I’m not going to repeat all the gory details, but basically once you have your custom widget built, you can deploy it so that it appears on the Mashup Center palette, and can be used like any other pre-existing widget. There’s also a command widget that retrieves all the case information so that it’s not loaded multiple times by all of the other widgets; it’s also a controller for moving between list and detail pages.

This is a bit more information that I was counting on absorbing this late in the day, and I ducked out early when the IBM partner started presented about what they’ve done with custom widgets.

That’s it for today; tomorrow will be a short day since I fly home mid-day, but I’ll likely be at one or two sessions in the morning.

Bill Lobig, Mike Marin, Peggy (didn’t catch her last name) and Lauren Mayes hosted a freeform roundtable for any technical questions about the new Case Manager product.

I had a chat with Mike prior to the talk, and he reinforced this during the session, about the genesis of Case Manager: although there were a lot of ideas that came from the old BPF product, Mike and his team spent months interviewing the people who had used BPF to find out what worked and what didn’t work, then built something new that incorporated the features most needed by customers. The object model for the case is now part of the basic server classes rather than being a higher-level (and therefore less efficient) custom object, there are new process classes to map properties between case folders and processes, and a number of other significant architectural changes and upgrades to make this happen. I see TIBCO going through this same pain right now with the lack of upgrade path from iProcess to AMX BPM, and to the guy in the audience who said that it’s not fair that IBM gives you a crappy product, you use it and provide feedback on how to improve it, then they charge you for the new product: well, that’s just how software works sometimes, and vendors will never have true innovation if they always have to be supporting their (and your) entire legacy. There does need to be some sort of migration path at least for the completed case folder objects from BPF to Case Manager native case objects, although that hasn’t been announced, since these are long-term corporate assets that have to be managed the same as any other content; however, I would not expect any migration of the BPF apps themselves.

More process functionality is being built right into the content engine; this is significant in that you’ve always required both ECM and BPM to do any process management, but it sounds like some functionality is being drawn into the content engine. Does this mean that the content and process engines eventually be merged into a single platform and a single product? That would drive further down the road of repositioning FileNet BPM as content-centric – originally done at the time of the FileNet acquisition, I believe, to avoid competition with WebSphere BPM – since if it’s truly content-centric, then why not just converge the engines, including the ACM capabilities? That would certainly make for a more seamless and consistent development environment, especially around issues like object modeling and security.

One consistent message that’s coming across in all the Case Manager sessions is accelerating the development time by allowing a business analyst to create a large part of a case application without involving IT; this is part of what BPF was trying to provide, and even BPM prior to that. I was FileNet’s evangelist for the launch of the eProcess product, which was the first version of the current generation of BPM, and we put forward the idea back in 2000 that a non-technical (or semi-technical) analyst could do some amount of the model-driven application development.

There are obviously still some rough edges in Case Manager still, since version 1.0 isn’t even out yet. In a previous session, we saw some of the kludges for content analytics, dashboarding and business rules, and it sounds like role-based security and e-forms isn’t really fully integrated either. The implications of these latter two are tied up with the ease in which you can migrate a case application from one environment to another, such as from development to test to production: apparently, not completely seamless, although they are able to bundle part of a case application/template and move it between environments in a single operation. Every vendor needs to deal with this issue, and those that have a more tightly integrated set of objects making up an application have a much easier time with this, especially if they also offer a cloud version of their software and need to migrate easily between on premise and cloud environments, such as TIBCO, Fujitsu and Appian. IBM is definitely playing catchup in the area of moving defined applications between environments, as well as their overall integration strategy within Case Manager.