Hi, my name is Matt Davies and I’m responsible for Product Marketing at Cordys. I’m very happy to be blogging here on BPMLeader.com. You can usually find me on http://blog.cordys.com

I was on a call the other day hearing the story of a leading US healthcare provider who are focused on delivering a coordinated care plan and care “supply chain”. They had three challenges that they needed to address at the same time – compliance, launching new products and speed to market.

To enable this they were looking to build a new software suite to extend their ability to be a healthcare provider. They selected case management as the approach to building their “patient wellness” software suite and effectively enable them to become a healthcare ISV as well as a service provider. Their solution will combine integration to existing systems, a powerful case engine and rich user interfaces customized to needs of healthcare stakeholders.

This got me thinking of another case management example I had seen earlier this year, in a very different industry, with very similar characteristics. In this case it was a very large EMEA based manufacturing company who were evolving from their core business to start to act as kind of service provider. In this case they wanted to provide contract, support and management services. To enable them to do this – they wanted to build a new software suite to support internal and external customers.

Much like the US healthcare provider, they selected case management as the basis for their new software suite and like the previous example, they were evolving from their core competency to being a different kind of service provider with their own ISV offering. In this case, the core of the application was case management but was integrated to Salesforce.com, SAP, M2M “big data” and a content management system.

The part of the application I saw was incident management which allowed the customer, service representative, product expert and engineer to all work together in a very flexible, collaborative way. As an incident happened – all the information about the customer, the asset (remote device), the contract and the historical information were at everyone’s finger tips. All of this data was presented through a rich UI and the data was made “actionable” by allowing a stakeholder to fire off the right business process from the case. This process had the right context and “intelligence” by having a single view of all the information.

These two examples combined with a recent conversation I had with Connie Moore from Forrester about “

” got me thinking – is one possible future of case management to be a blueprint, design pattern and technology platform for certain types of applications? If we look at case management evolving beyond the case folder approach and into an application “design pattern” then what are the characteristics of the application:

• Built for flexibility and able to deal with the unstructured and the ad-hoc
• Integrated across all the information, systems and data – be that existing on-premise, content and documents, cloud services and SaaS, big data, M2M etc
• Designed with people, collaboration and capturing knowledge at its core
• Actionable, with the ability to take the right decision, action it, trigger the right process and deliver the right outcome
• Built in enterprise mobility and available to anyone interacting and participating in the case “anywhere, anytime, on any device”

Based on the two examples I described above and other commentary, I think we’re already seeing the start of case management as an application “design pattern” but I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below