There have been a been a couple posts recently, and I was too busy last week to respond, about the announcement by IBM for its new Advanced Case Management.   Hmmm, sounds a bit like Adaptive Case Management.  Is it the same thing?  We don’t know for sure, but I am willing to bet that IBM is talking about ACM for the same reasons I am talking about ACM.

One thing to note is that it is a “Strategy”.  That means there is no particular product packaged ready to ship, but instead if you go explain your problem to them, and it looks like a case management problem, they will be able to put together the right technology to fit your need.  Even though it is not a discrete product, the fact that they are announcing this means that they recognize the need for a new kind of case management.  They are see, what I am seeing, in the need to support knowledge workers, and a new approach to meet that need.

Here are some posts relevant to that:

• IBM Advanced Case Management Blog
• IBM’s Information Page on Advanced Case Management
• James Taylor’s post on it
• BPM Bulletin on it (French)

Is it the same as Adaptive Case Management.  It has social and collaborative features.  It has analytics.  It takes a data and content oriented approach.  They say it is designed for organizations that need more “responsiveness” (i.e. Agility).     They say it helps extract “more value out of their information” (i.e. knowledge work). The promote the Forrester white paper on “Dynamic Case Management” on the web site.  This quote from their Executive Briefing puts it squarely in the knowledge worker / unpredictable process space:

Automation has reduced repetitive work, so some knowledge workers consistently handle cases that are less structured, are more ad hoc and require more skills and interaction with specialists and subject matter experts (SMEs). Often, the handling process can be visualized only after it is completed, requiring a dynamic way to handle the case while it’s still in process. A flexible and dynamic case management strategy can enable organizations to handle more cases and exceptions, without growing headcounts, by better managing the processes associated with case management.

(I added the bold styling).  I am not surprised that they see this as important.  I had a conversation with a Gartner analyst yesterday who confirmed that they see case management as probably the most rapidly accelerating segment of the process market place.