A paper that I wrote on case management and low code. Low code application development platforms are definitely the way to go for building long-tail case management, but you can also flip this around: the case management paradigm is a perfect match when you're building low-code applications. The paper was sponsored by TIBCO but doesn't discuss their products.

1. A Perfect Combination: Low
Code and Case Management
November 2017
Kemsley Design Ltd.
www.kemsleydesign.com
www.column2.com

2. 1
Overview
Increasing automation, including of transactional
processes, has enabled a shift to higher value
knowledge work performed using case management
methods and systems. Embracing low-code case
management platforms enables fast development of
a broad range of knowledge worker applications to
support and automate the type of work that provides
a competitive differentiation.
About the Author
Sandy Kemsley is an independent analyst,
consultant and process architect specializing in
business process management and the social
enterprise. She has founded companies in the area
of content management, process management and
e-commerce, and held the position of BPM
evangelist for a major software vendor.
Sandy writes a popular BPM blog at column2.com
and is a featured conference speaker on BPM and
digital transformation. She is a contributing author to
books on social BPM and adaptive case
management, and the winner of the 2016 Marvin L.
Manheim award for significant contributions in the
field of workflow.

3. 2
Case Management in
Business
Case management is a work style for goal-
oriented scenarios that don’t have a
predefined method of resolution. Centered
around a case file that contains all related
content, case management relies on
knowledge workers to gather information
from a variety of sources, guide the work
towards a resolution, assign tasks to other
participants and make
decisions that cannot
easily be automated.
Each scenario, or case,
may follow a different
path, since the worker
decides what must be
accomplished to complete
the case. These methods
are well-established in
fields such as healthcare
and law, but have broader
business applicability in
insurance, social
services, customer
relations and many others. A case may be
initiated directly by a customer (including
an internal customer such as an employee
or other department) or triggered by an
automated process to handle an
exception, and is considered closed when
the customer issue is resolved.
For example, an automobile accident
insurance claim is initiated by the
policyholder (customer) and requires that
the claims adjudicator (employee) gather
information from a variety of sources and
make a decision on whether to allow or
deny the claim. The adjudicator requests
information from the policyholder and third
parties in the accident, and initiates actions
to be performed by other participants, such
as a medical examination for an injury sub-
claim, or a review of property damage by a
field adjudicator. As the adjudicator
gathers each piece of
information or makes
decisions, it is
documented in the claim
folder, so that the claim
folder becomes the
auditable record of how
the claim was resolved:
statements, photos,
expert reports and more.
Although some portions of
the claims handling may
be standardized, in
general the information,
actions and participants are not known in
advance, but are decided by the claims
adjudicator in their role as the case worker
responsible for resolving the claim.
Furthermore, the adjudicator relies on their
own knowledge of the necessary
compliance regulations for dealing with the
claim, increasing the business risk and the
level of training required for adjudicators.
The adjudicator may be able to make a
Case Management Examples
➢ Insurance claims
➢ Fraud investigations
➢ Patient medical care plans
➢ Client onboarding
➢ IT service requests
➢ Litigation
➢ Customer service/complaints
➢ Social benefits management
➢ Loan origination
➢ Recruiting
➢ Employee performance
management

4. 3
near-immediate decision and resolve the
claim within hours, or the claim may
remain open for years for disability or
litigation matters. In paper-based claims
environments, a long-term claim folder can
extend to several physical file folders of
documents plus online electronic
documents and emails.
Workers in many businesses are spending
more of their time on this unpredictable,
customer-facing knowledge work, since
much of the routine transactional work is
becoming increasingly automated or
performed by customers through self-
service portals. As competing businesses
gain similar levels of efficiency through
automation, case management becomes a
key competitive differentiator since it
directly impacts the customer journey, with
the potential to improve quality and
timeliness of outcomes. This does not
mean that every issue can be resolved
using a “one size fits all” case
management template; rather, that goal-
oriented problem-solving becomes
embedded in the business culture,
regardless of how it is supported by
methods and technology.
Case Management
Systems
Case management is still overwhelmingly
manual, since packaged software is too
inflexible to handle these scenarios, and
developing custom code that attempts to
cover every possible situation is
impractical and stifles business innovation.
Case files may be paper documents or
electronic files on a shared network drive,
with case tasks assigned and completed
using email, checklists and spreadsheets
based on the knowledge of the case
worker, and business rules gleaned from
procedures manuals and business folklore.
This creates inefficiencies due to little or
no automation of routine tasks, and risks
noncompliance since each worker must
remember to apply the correct business
rules. New workers experience significant
training time to learn the ad hoc
processes and rules: in a complex
case management environment, 6-
12 months is typical for a worker to
reach full capacity.
Customer
Information
Ad Hoc Tasks &
Collaboration
Predefined
Processes
Events
Compliance
& Rules
Analytics &
Recommendations

5. 4
Vertical case management solutions have
succeeded in improving some high-volume
applications such as claims processing,
but can be inflexible and expensive,
making it impossible for them to keep up
with fast-moving business requirements or
be repurposed for other case management
needs. There is a better solution: general-
purpose case management platforms that
combine content, process, rules, events,
integration, mobile support and user
experience in an integrated platform for
developing a wider variety of case
management applications.
Simpler case management systems
manage electronic case files and provide
user interfaces that allow workers to create
checklists and ad hoc flows related to
those files. This removes email and
spreadsheets from the work, but doesn’t
completely resolve the noncompliance and
training issues, since rules and decisions
are still mostly manual. More intelligent
case management platforms integrate
additional technologies that can support
and guide knowledge workers: decision
management, analytics, predictions,
events, automation and machine learning.
These intelligent technologies automate
tasks where possible and provide smart
recommendations to workers based on
historical data, the case context,
compliance regulations and broader
situational awareness.
Returning to our claims management
example from the previous section, a case
management system reduces risk by
directly building procedures and
regulations into the case handling. Once
this key knowledge is built into the
systems, the time to train claims
adjudicators typically falls from about 12
months to less than 3 months. It also
allows portions of the work on the claim to
be easily handed off for less-skilled
workers to complete in parallel, reducing
the amount of administrative work (and
hence costs) done by the adjudicators and
shortening the time to resolve the claim.
The result: claims are resolved faster at a
lower cost, and are more compliant with
company and industry regulations.
Features of Case Management Systems
➢ Defining of reusable case structure and
applications, e.g., work stages, milestones, data
models, business rules, integration points, user
experience
➢ Integrated end-user environment with a
complete view of the case: content, actions,
decisions, participants and case data from other
systems
➢ Contextual information relevant to the case or
task, e.g., aggregate statistics, operating
procedures, regulations and industry trends
➢ Case worker ability to select tasks and process
to be executed, automate manual steps and
reassign work
➢ Enforcement of consistent regulations and
procedures
➢ Recommendations on the next best action
➢ Asynchronous inbound event handling, e.g.,
arrival of new case information

6. 5
Case Management Meets
Low Code
Older case management systems require
a high degree of technical skill and product
training, and a lengthy development time,
to configure them for each application. The
challenge is that many workers now use
case management methods for most of
their work, but it’s not uniform: an
organization may have dozens of different
types of knowledge work that could be
improved by a targeted case management
application. This large number of potential
applications makes it infeasible for
traditional application development
resources to build solutions for each of
these scenarios, especially for competitive
or regulatory applications that must be
deployed quickly in response to changing
needs.
The new generation of case management
systems addresses the development
resource issue by converging with low-
code application development, creating
platforms with general-purpose case
management frameworks and related
technologies as components. This allows
semi-technical “citizen developers” with a
minimum of training to assemble
completely new applications in a matter of
hours or days without writing code: they
simply configure the frameworks and add
the building blocks required for their
application. With robust capabilities
underlying the platform – content,
process, decisions, integration and
analytics engines – as well as guardrails
to ensure security and performance, these
are not prototypes or “shadow IT”
applications unsupported by IT, but first-
class business applications. Situational
applications can be created quickly and
deployed for only a matter of weeks to
manage a specific event or campaign;
while line-of-business applications can
involve collaboration between citizen
developers creating the case
management structure and IT developing
custom services that can be used as
building blocks in the applications.
Low Code Platform Functions
➢ Integrated development environment for creating
applications, and an integrated end-user
environment for running applications
➢ Data modeling capabilities integrating multiple data
sources into a virtual data object model
➢ Visual tools, e.g., forms builder, for creating end
user interfaces, including support for mobile
platforms
➢ Process modeling capabilities, from simple
milestone-based flows to full BPMN models
➢ Event handling, rules and automated decisioning to
trigger actions, make recommendations and
automate activities
➢ Pluggable services and visual widgets to extend
capabilities
➢ Analytics integrated in end-user environment and
aggregated for management reporting
➢ DevOps capabilities and governance for fast
deployment into production, either directly by the
business developers or through an accelerated
process that avoids IT bottlenecks, without risking
system integrity

7. 6
Clearly, low code is a good platform for
building many types of case management
applications. What is also becoming clear
is that case management is often the best
paradigm for building low code
applications. Here’s why:
1. More understandable to business.
The data-centric, goal-driven case
management approach is a better fit
for knowledge work scenarios. It's
more intuitive for business people to
specify the data, documents and
decisions required to solve a
problem than to create a process
model showing the specific steps.
2. Faster time to market. A case
management application can start
small ‒ and fast ‒ and have new
features rolled out continuously to
enhance capabilities. A starter
application may contain only a basic
data model, a list of case states, and
a checklist of optional and required
tasks. Since skilled knowledge
workers are using the application,
they can determine which functions
to add in future versions, and even
modify the design themselves.
3. Improved flexibility. Case
management relies on knowledge
workers to decide what tasks to do
next, rather than dictate a specific
process. This allows a wide variety
of scenarios to be addressed with a
single application.
4. Focus on integration. Case
management applications gather
data from a wide variety of sources
to provide a single integrated
environment for knowledge workers
and call services (including visual
widgets) to extend the capabilities.
5. Monitoring relative to goals. Case
management tracks each case
relative to its goals, e.g., resolving a
customer complaint, rather than
completing specific process steps.
6. Entire case in one place. Case
management systems keep a
persistent record of the case (the
case folder) during and after
completion.
Sponsor
This white paper was sponsored by
TIBCO Software Inc.