The WfMC announced the finalists in the 2012 Global Awards for Excellence in Adaptive Case Management.  The actual awards will be announced and presented on June 6th at the ACM Live online event.  If you are interested in how use cases were selected, I have included the criteria below that was used to measure each case.  These criteria form a good guideline for what an ACM product should ultimately be able to do.

Thanks to the Judges

I just want to mention thanks and appreciation to the following experts in the business
process space who helped in the judging of the entries:

• Max Pucher – Lead Judge
• John Matthias – Co-created Criteria
• Fred Cummins
• David Duggal
• Keith Harrison-Broninski
• Dana Khoyi
• Tom Shepherd
• Marco Brambilla
• K Walter Keirstead
• Alberto Manuel
• Sandy Kemsley
• Chuck Webster
• Nathaniel Palmer
• Keith Swenson

ACM Award Criteria 2012

A use case nominated for an ACM Global Excellence Award should illustrate the inherent needs and challenges of knowledge work, and why an ACM solution is offering advantages not attainable with other solutions. The criteria for the nominated use case are phrased in terms of challenges posed by the work being supported.

These criteria do not represent required threshold that a case must include. It is doubtful that any given case will score highly in all, or even a majority, of the criteria below. These criteria simply represent the dimensions of measurement, and use cases will be compared along these guidelines, and the best cases chosen. Conversely, aspects of the use case outside of what is mentioned are not relevant in judging, and should not affect the score either positively or negatively.

1 The Challenge of Aligning Work with Goals and Objectives

• Define Goals: Use case shows how business users (executives, management, process owners) are able to define their objectives, process goals and customer outcomes.
• Performance Targets: Use case shows how business users are able to evaluate alignment of their work with business objectives and process goals, and verify performance targets (service levels and KPIs) and customer outcomes, through automated rules or by user feedback, presented as a process dashboard, balanced scorecard, and data visualization.
• Timeline: Use case shows how a case manager can plan timelines for the case, including the identification of stages and milestones.
• Ad-hoc Targets: Use case shows how business users are enabled to add goals and performance measurements (KPIs) at runtime that were not previously anticipated.
• Terminology/Ontology: Use case shows how a business terminology/ontology is utilized by the business users to describe cases, tasks, templates, rules, states and semantic relationships between those.

2. The Challenge of Evolving Processes for New and Existing Cases

• Templates: Use case shows how business users can use task templates (with embedded resources such as data, forms, content, rules, UI), for initiating new cases without requiring IT/developer involvement or redeployment.
• Extending Template: Use case shows how business users can extend a case goal by adding tasks with related pre/post dependencies or rules, without requiring IT/developer involvement or redeployment.
• New Triggers: Use case shows how well the business user is able to receive external triggers, notification of events and other information, and automatically assign them either to existing cases and tasks or alternatively create new tasks, without requiring IT/developer involvement or redeployment.
• Case Linking: Use case shows how a business user can link certain instances of case/process goals with other cases and create case-to-case dependencies at runtime.

3 The Challenge of Enabling Collaboration

• Define Resources: Use case shows how non-technical business users can define business resources (documents, tasks, templates, rules, wizards) and make them available to the performers who use them in their cases.
• Broadcast: Use case shows how business users can engage in social collaboration, making people, tasks and resources publicly searchable or available to interested users by subscription.
• Personal Relationships: Use case shows how business users can define and share a list of performers and their organizational relationships, including skill profiles and expertise, enabling experts to be drawn into cases as needed.
• Mobile: Use case shows how business users are able to perform casework as mobile users and promote casework to other mobile users, with nearly the same power and flexibility of a stationary workstation.
• Unified Communications: Use case shows how business users can utilize email, Twitter, or other social media means to invite collaboration/communication from within the case and record of such conversations becomes part of the case history.

4. The Challenge of Capturing Data and Content

• Capture: Use case shows how business users can perform casework through automatic import of data from external sources such as email, email attachments, scanned documents, triggers from silo-apps, tweets, and other sources, including dynamic and static exchanges between participants, to change the state and progress of a case.
• Ad-Hoc Capture: Use case shows how a case manager can incorporate an unanticipated document or measured value into a case.
• Map To Terminology: Use case shows how the business data and content are mapped to the business ontology or specific terminology of that business. Case managers are not forced to use a foreign or technical vocabulary.
• Return Routing: Use case shows how business content that was sent to an external partner or customer can be easily identified and received back into the case that sent it.

5 The Challenge of Exporting Data and Content

• Distribution: Use case shows how business users can create standard correspondence (letters, emails, text messages, etc.), and modify them as appropriate, at any point in the case, capturing the context of interaction and responses.
• Reports: Use case shows how business users can map business data into standard & adhoc reports and make those reports available to a wider audience by any means (web, social nets, cloud storage, beyond simply emailing the report).
• Feeds: Use case shows how business users can allow people to subscribe to cases and be informed of changes as they happen.
• State Rollup: Use case shows how content state controls task states and case goal achievement.
• Post Data: Use case shows how business users can select a service task or command that will write business data to an external data repository while ensuring that such actions are properly synchronized with the case state.

6 The Challenge of Configuring the Solution In-flight

• Directory Integration: Use case shows that existing user role and profile definitions (such as LDAP) can be used for user authorization.
• Authorization: Use case shows how case manager can ensure authorization, authentication, secure communication, and secure task delegation appropriate to the information needs of the case.
• Self Registration: Use case shows how business users can add themselves and set up their own profile if invited to a case. Can they bring their own identity (OpenID)?
• Schema Extension: Use case shows how non-technical business users can add new data fields for entry and reporting, and write rules that describe process logic, constraints, field validations, and formatting.
• Form Extension: Use case shows how non-technical business staff can define and modify role-based user interface definitions within the context of the case to create inbox, resource, activity, search, overview, and dashboard layouts.
• Change Control: Use case shows that the case manager can control who can modify which configuration elements (goal definitions, data access, content creation and capture, rule definitions, UI definitions).
• Multi-platform: Use case shows that such UI definitions and role profiles are usable in thick client, portal and mobile use cases of the solution.

7 The Challenge of Dynamic Access Control

• Admission: Use case shows how a case manager can make a document or form available to anyone, literally anyone without exception. Allowing a new, unanticipated person access is an easy, normal part of working on the case, and not viewed as an administrative capability.
• Granularity: Use case shows that the role and authority definitions allow fine-grained definition as to who can view modify certain elements of business content controlled by case and content state.
• Visibility: Use case shows how a case manager has visibility of what case information can be seen by whom, and can exclude access to anyone, or to particular documents/forms of the case.
• History Access: Use case shows how a case manager can see case history and make all or portions of it available to other users without violating access constraints within the case. History cannot be used to gain access to, or information about, things that are excluded from particular users.
• Archiving: Use case shows how business users can transition access control easily from active case mode (specific people, temporal situations) to closed case archive mode.
• Access to Template Library: Use case shows that role and authorization definition provides fine-grained control as to who can access, use and modify the template libraries that contain all the case template resources.

8. The Challenge of Providing Business Value

• Measured Value: Use case shows how business users can become more effective and efficient through the ability to identify cases, organize content distinctly from other cases, allow cross-references and linkages between cases.
• Improvement: Use case shows how business users can provide improved customer service and satisfaction through monitoring quality.
• Efficiency: Use case shows how business users can become more productive through reduced re-work, prioritizing activity across multiple cases, balancing workload, timeliness, and employee satisfaction.
• Training: Use case shows how business users through in-flight guidance can reduce how much training is required to learn case management skills, and how change management was facilitated for knowledge workers.
• Feedback: Use case shows that the solution enables rating of cases, tasks, resources and most of all customer outcomes and thus provides immediate feedback to the process owners without the need for later user surveys and statistical analysis.

9 The Challenge of Improving Processes

• Change Management: Use case shows that version control (subsequent) and variant (concurrent) handling of all case templates, elements and resources is provided in a change management setup that allows testing and functional simulation and that productive version changes are automatically deployed at defined times.
• Comparison: Use case shows that different execution paths of reaching process goals and outcomes can be compared to understand the trade-offs between process cost, completion times and perceived customer satisfaction.
• Process Mining: Use case shows how business users can gain insight into processes through a process mining capability that collects and processes external and internal event information to discover and improve processes.
• Audit: Use case shows how business users can audit individual cases and user actions for quality control, and for lessons learned using archive cases containing complete case history.

10 Overall Impression

• Rate the overall ability of the solution to empower the knowledge worker.
• Rate the overall ability of the solution to drive and respond to business innovation.
• Rate the overall weighting of the solution as exemplifying an ‘adaptive’ solution.
• Overall impression of quality of the case
• Overall impression of interest to the general public
• Overall impression of relevance to the field of ACM