Adaptive Case Management: Overview and Research Challenges

Case management refers to the coordination of work that is not routine and predictable, and requires human judgment. Case management has applications in many domains such as healthcare, legal, police detective, social work, etc. The common aspect of such domains is that the work procedure cannot be prescribed into machine programs, instead the work is highly variable and must be figured out by knowledge workers each time. They might start with high-level guidelines and frameworks, but the sensitive dependence upon the details of the case mean that the work patterns emerge from the case as more information becomes available. Knowledge workers must make decisions on the course of action as the case proceeds. Traditionally case management has been supported by custom-built applications for each domain. There are approaches that attempt to standardize work practices without appreciating the full range of required responses. There is a push in industry from different vendors in areas such as enterprise content management, customer relationship management and business process management also to position their products as case management applications. In this article, we will review trends in industry and selected work in academia in the case management space, to identify challenges that the industry and the research community are facing in supporting knowledge workers in an adaptive and flexible manner, where systems need to support the work while should keep the knowledge workers in control.