ISIS Papyrus UTA Presented in ACM Workshop at EDOC 2014

The Adaptive Case Management (ACM) Workshop at EDOC 2014, which took place September 1 in Ulm, Germany, provided a platform for researchers and practitioners to discuss ACM and other non-workflow approaches to BPM.

With a list of top-class participants and an audience even larger than at last year’s EDOC, the ACM Workshop sparked inspiring discussions. Turning ACM into a mainstream topic and how company management paradigms must change first were among the hottest topics.

In his keynote, Keith Swenson envisions ACM going far beyond the IT core systems and enabling emergent processes by bringing in experts and people from different organizations as the current situation demands. For him, bridges across systems, systems thinking, organizational mindsets and terminology are going to become even more important.

In the research sessions, Ph students and their professors outlined their current scientific ACM research topics with focus on ACM guidance for knowledge workers, a solid ACM definition and underlying theory, and knowledge extraction from existing cases, such as the User-Trained Agent (UTA) developed by ISIS Papyrus.

In the practical sessions, three leading companies in the field of business process management (BPM) were invited to give insight into their ACM approaches: Exformatics A/S and Computas showed different aspects such as a flow chart-based guidance and a blackboard metaphor to enrich collaborative ACM Systems.

ISIS Papyrus presented its position paper, “Towards a pattern recognition approach for transferring knowledge in ACM,” and unveiled the full potential of the User-Trained Agent (UTA) in a captivating video. The UTA was widely acknowledged as an important ACM component for enabling knowledge sharing and collaboration between teams.

This year’s ACM Workshop at EDOC emphasized that a paradigm shift must occur in company management: People should be encouraged to work self-responsibly towards goals without being controlled and micro-managed. When you stop looking only at cost efficiency and start focusing on customer satisfaction and effectiveness, ACM paves the way to empower your employees to achieve this goal.

ISIS Papyrus Joins ACM Workshop at EDOC 2014

The Adaptive Case Management (ACM) Workshop will be held during EDOC 2014 on September 1st, 2014, in Ulm, Germany. Organized by Dr. Ilia Bider of Stockholm University and Keith Swenson of Fujitsu, the workshop brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss theoretical and practical problems and solutions in the area of ACM and other non-workflow approaches to BPM. On the part of ISIS Papyrus Thanh Tran Thi Kim, Christoph Ruhsam, Max J. Pucher, Maximilian Kobler and Jan Mendling will present the position paper “Towards a pattern recognition approach for transferring knowledge in ACM”.

The need for adaptive capabilities for the modern user-interactive enterprise has been repeatedly confirmed by research into how companies organize themselves and by the limitations and shortcomings observed in conventional approaches and tools to manage the business ecosystem. They can be summarized as follows: Business Process Management (BPM) is focused on repetitive processes with strict workflows. The necessary abstractions, however, make it impossible to handle more complex tasks. Pure case management, on the other hand, offers much higher flexibility but fails to give guidance to business users and makes it difficult to enforce compliance with policies and regulations. The inherent simplification of case management solutions will furthermore lead to inaccuracies in the underlying model.

In contrast, Adaptive Case Management provides both flexibility and guidance. It focuses on case information, not on the process. A case gathers all the necessary information required to handle it: These are performers (users/roles participating in the case), data/content, rules and of course processes and tasks. Adaptive Case Management is designed to empower knowledge workers by giving them the power to make autonomous decisions within the constraints of the overall business strategy. The management defines achievable business and process goals and communicates them transparently while business users themselves add tasks to achieve these goals. This leads to a “design-by-doing” approach enabling users to create, modify, and analyze processes on the fly. Adaptive processes, despite lacking a predictable and repeatable progression, nevertheless go from a less ordered to a more ordered state through user action. Decisions taken by business users are furthermore shared by storing them in templates and making them available to other actors within the company as suggested actions.

Adaptive Case Management is well suited for arbitrary document content, collaborative decision-making and a high level of customer interaction. It can be used in every service-oriented and customer-focused operation of a company dealing with complex, event-driven activities from customer claims management and contract management to new accounts, purchase-to-pay, fraud investigations,  and many other applications across a broad range of domains.