Towards Speech-Act-Based Adaptive Case Management

Knowledge workers already face a broad range of tools to support their work, e.g. adaptive case management systems, tailored information systems, groupware, and other (process) support systems. Case data is scattered across many systems, and the overlapping structured, semi-structured, and ad-hoc processes involved further impede keeping track of related data and activities. Organizations are socio-technical entities, and interactions have significant impact on their success. Today, around 50% of the work in the US is knowledge work, and other countries show a similar tendency. Improving integration of appropriate tools for knowledge work and augmenting support for interactions therefore offers to increase productivity in a very influential part of the workforce. Knowledge workers are well aware of the pragmatic intention of their communicative acts, but currently their systems are not. We suggest to use Speech Act Theory to enable useful inferences and to improve integration of the various tools for knowledge work. A focus on interactions raises awareness for the pragmatic intention and commitments in particular. It can help providing line markings for knowledge workers by facilitating compliance monitoring for interactions and artifacts stemming from many participating systems and manual documentation. Interactions already tie many separate systems together, and standardizing as well as partially automating them can therefore further simplify integration. Speech-act-based adaptive case management offers to increase process transparency, enable useful inferences, and integrate structured, semi-structured, and ad-hoc processes.