ISSIP

ADAPTIVE CASE MANAGEMENT AND FUTURE OF OF WORKFLOW AUTOMATION

urlCharlie Bess,  HP Fellow, ISSIP VP,  Chair Service Futures SIG, and BOD Member

I was in a discussion with a researcher at the MIT Center for Digital Business a few weeks back. We were talking about automated workflow and tools that will shape services futures like adaptive case management. Case management in its most generic form is tracking the response to a request for service. That is fairly industry independent and happens all around us in our personal and business life. For example: I can’t get to this node on the network if  my password doesn’t work.

The Pareto principle comes into play when trying to automate case management – most of these issues are straightforward. As you look at automation the way it is performed today, the degree of variability and unpredictability are core concerns about what can be automated.

As decision making processes take advantage of greater sensing and the analytic capabilities enabled by more processing power they can categorize the variability and understand its structure. If the response required remains unpredictable though, human intervention will still be required. This is where the concept of human augmented automation can come into play. Focusing the people on deriving value from the anomalies – clearing an area for service futures work. When you are trying to perform attention engineering to maximize the value generation of employees, the decisions that can be automated are important, since it allows attention to be focused and efficiently consumed. Automation can say:

  1. It will do the task
  2. It will not do the task because it shouldn’t be done
  3. Someone or something else is needed to address the situation