Is it just me, or does Case Management seem to be suffering from an identity crisis? It doesn’t seem like anyone can properly articulate to me what it is, what it does, and how it can help organizations.
Like any internet savvy consumer, I took to Google and searched for “Case Management Solutions.” Well, that wasn’t much help as it returned 47 million results (go ahead, try it yourself). Beyond the mass of web pages talking about Case Management, you start seeing a number of industry specific solutions. I quickly saw products for law firms, healthcare, and government entities, all pitching to manage “cases” within those industries. I understand what a “case” means to these industries, but what does it mean to the rest of us? That’s where things begin to drop off.
So I took to AIIM.org, the Association for Information and Image Management, a great resource for anything relating to Enterprise Content Management, which is the industry where this Case Management buzzword has been growing. Their definition of Case Management is:
A “case” is any project, transaction, service or response that is “opened” and “closed” over a period of time to achieve resolution of a problem, claim, request, proposal, development or other complex activity. It is likely to involve multiple persons inside and outside the organization, with varying relationships to each other, as well as multiple documents and messages.
Hmm. Good information, but this still is not resonating for me. So begins my quest to attempt to educate the world on what Case Management really is.
