So much positive news in the space of a week had me feeling optimistic that we are on a path to stop wasting tax payer money and bring effective IT systems to government.  But my good mood ended when an e-mail hit my inbox with fresh evidence of some of the thinking and behaviors that have caused the Federal government’s IT investments to significantly underperform.

Here’s some background.  The first Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, introduced a 25 Point Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management in 2010 because of the sorry state of affairs that existed with government IT systems.  Kundra noted in the introduction to the plan, “despite spending more than $600 billion on information technology over the past decade, the Federal Government has achieved little of the productivity improvements that private industry has realized from IT.”

The uncertainty around Federal contracting rules is one reason for this poor performance.  Both government officials and vendors have been unclear as to what type of communication is sanctioned and what is not.  This has kept government IT leaders’ knowledge of latest technologies and adoption strategies behind the times.  The attention brought by the 25 point plan has spurred other parts of the government to rally and help.  Ms. Field’s memo titled, “Myth-Busting 2: Addressing Misconceptions and Further Improving Communication During the Acquisition Process” is one example.   Ms. Field notes in the memo, “Early, frequent, and constructive engagement with industry leads to better acquisition outcomes, which is why it is one of the key tenets of the Office of Management and Budget’s 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal IT Management.“  Ms. Field went on to say further that, “Agencies appreciate industry’s valuable input into their acquisition strategies and solicitation packages because it may result in a better solution to their requirements. Suggesting detailed solutions to your concerns is even more valuable.”

The e-mail that turned my excitement to mush contained a newly released pre-RFP for a major Federal IT system.  The buyer sent out the pre-RFP to learn as much as possible about commercial best practices so it could adopt the best strategy to convert its legacy information systems environment into an agile and flexible operation.  I thought, “Great!  Here’s an agency that really wants to learn and is being proactive ahead of a major purchase.”  But my heart sank when I continued reading and found this sentence, “The agency has determined that the best approach for systems modernization is to use a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solution rather than transforming its legacy systems.”  By specifying COTS, the agency had greatly restricted the field of possible solutions.

Things actually got worse from there.  The pre-RFP goes on to detail lots of specific functionality that the buyer says must be already available in the solution.  This sounds like a logical approach to purchasing, but it is way behind the times for IT systems selection.  By following this approach, the buyer is falling into an all-too-common trap that’s been a significant contributor to the $600B of ineffective government IT spending.

Let me explain.  The problem with the approach of limiting choices to COTS applications and evaluating them based on specific functionalities is that to have a successful selection, you need to document every known requirement and predict future requirements.  Not only does this require lots of work, it’s really an impossible task.  Users of IT systems often don’t know what they want (or what’s possible) until they get to start using new technology.  They really need hands-on experience before they can identify their most important requirements.  Evaluating COTS vendors based on specific functionality has shown to be equally flawed.  A full evaluation could determine that certain features are present in a particular product (allowing it to get a “check in the box”), only to have users realize six months after implementation that they didn’t ask for what they really wanted.  Now they are stuck.

So I’m going to accept Ms. Field’s invitation and begin my education for Federal IT buyers right here and now.  There’s one thing I can say that I believe will radically change the performance of Federal IT systems and it’s this:  Stop the COTS madness!

Leading private sector companies like Amazon.com, CME Group, and Crawford have already awoken to the fact that COTS products are attractive because they seem to do all or most of what you need, but in reality they fall short.  What looked good in a demo often has great limitations in practice.  I can hear what’s going through your head right now, “So you just ask the vendor to make a change to the product to fit your needs.”  Good luck.  Buyers of COTS applications all wake up to the fact that they are just one of many customers, each of whom wants changes to fit their needs.  What’s a typical COTS vendor, who has to look out for the interests of its shareholders, going to do?  They have to make hard choices about which customers to make happy and which to leave to find their own solutions.  How do I know?  Because I’ve worked for a number of COTS companies and I’ve seen this play out many times.  I was even the leader of Product Management at some of these companies and it was my job to make the hard decisions.

Instead of coming to an RFP with a COTS mentality and a long list of requirements to check off, Federal IT buyers need to create their RFPs around these principles:

• Ease of adapting a technology to fit evolving needs outweighs any list of current functionality
• You must get economies of scale from any purchase so you can avoid additional software license costs for your next set of needs and give your users the benefits of working from one platform
• Your organization, not the vendor, must have the ability to make adaptations on their own
• Easy movement between cloud and on-premise deployment is a must-have
• Built-in native mobile functionality on all major platforms is a requirement so the need for separate mobile applications can be eliminated
• Social collaboration must also be built-in to help shorten process cycle times

These principles support the goals of the 25 point Federal IT reform plan.  When Federal buyers adopt these principles, they will find themselves drawn towards business process management technology (BPM).  Over 35 Federal agencies are already experiencing great success with Appian’s BPM software, including the US Marine Corps, FDIC, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, FDA, FEMA, The Library of Congress, and Defense Acquisition University.  It’s time to stop the COTS madness and join them.

Want to learn more about the challenges of COTS software?  Read my white paper titled, “Don’t License Another Software Application Until You Read This!”

Evan McDonnell

Vice President of Solutions

First up is the annual ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum from May 15th to May 17th in Orlando, Florida. As the premier event for insurance technology, business, and networking, you will hear from and meet today’s thought leaders who are defining and shaping the industry’s future. Find us in booth #1117 in the Exhibit Hall, where you will see how Appian BPM can help your organization tap the power of process innovation in the mobile and social age, and learn why we are the leader in Mobile BPM. In the mean time, check out insurance solutions and customers who are using Appian BPM to make their business more competitive, more agile, and more intelligent.

Want to learn more about mobile for the enterprise? Join us at the Mobile Government Implementation Strategies Seminar on May 16th in Washington, District of Columbia (DC). Learn how Federal agencies implement bring-your-own device (BYOD) and other mobility strategies while meeting technical challenges, ensuring data and network security. Hear from Appian’s VP of Federal and other executives on a “Making the Most of Mobility Technology for Your Agency” panel discussion at this free event. Appian delivers government solutions on a flexible platform that’s also cloud and mobile enabled. Learn how over 35 Federal agencies are using Appian BPM, including the US Army, FDA, FEMA, and more.

Can’t make it to Florida or DC next week? Register for the “Modern BPM for Process Innovation” webinar on May 17^th. Find out how your organization can leverage BPM, cloud technology, social collaboration, and mobility to drive performance and success. Start your journey to become an agile organization that can respond quickly to change and gain competitive advantage in the marketplace.

We are also planning to roll out the Tips and Tricks Webinar series for our customers and partners who want to take their BPM skills and projects to the next level. Stay tuned for announcement and updates on the Appian Forum.

Cindy Cheng, Director, Product Marketing

This ability to “view the source” is at the heart of the various advantages a BPM software platform has over packaged applications, also known as Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) software.

The beauty of building applications using a BPM platform like Appian is that you truly own your applications. This is because all decent BPM platforms include a graphical modeler where an application’s pieces are configured, not coded. Instead of needing access to the underlying Java/C++ code, you only need access to the underlying configuration for Process Models, Rules, User Interfaces, etc.

For example, at any time you can view the source configuration for a BPM application simply by opening the Process Models in the modeler. And of course, because all good BPM suites use BPMN notation, the Process Models can be understood by anyone familiar with this industry standard notation. The same concept of configuration over coding applies to Rules, Constants, Data Structures, etc.

This is important because having access to your application source means you can see exactly how and why your application is working the way it is. Need to trace back and see why a certain decision was made? Just open the history of the model and view the gateway and rule logic that led to the final state. In addition, if you see an opportunity to improve your business processes, you can easily enhance your application if you have access to the source. You aren’t at the mercy of a consultant’s coding expertise (and hourly fee) or a vendor’s development roadmap.

In addition, truly advanced BPM suites provide full export capability, allowing you to export an entire application as a collection of XML files. This is especially important if you are running your BPM applications in the cloud. The website CIO.com recently highlighted the problem of cloud providers holding customer applications hostage. With responsible cloud BPM suites like Appian, customers need not worry because the customers themselves have the ability to export their entire application whenever they like.

With a BPM platform like Appian, you always have access to the source configuration for your applications. With that comes a degree of control that is simply not possible with COTS software. To learn more about the advantages of BPM software over packaged applications, read our “Don’t License Another Software Application Until You Read This!” white paper.

- Jed Fonner, Principal Consultant

Federal CIO Steven Van Roekel wants federal agency CIOs to embrace precisely that same lesson. Earlier this month, he announced finalization of the Federal IT Shared Services Strategy. This is big news, and BPM software can play a big role in helping government IT become “good sharers.”

The finalization of this strategy gives new directives (and new powers) to government CIOs to find new ways to leverage existing IT assets and programs across agencies. The essence of the goal, in Van Roekel’s words, is “to root out waste and duplication across the Federal IT portfolio.”

An IT shared service is defined as “an information technology function that is provided for consumption by multiple organizations within or between Federal Agencies.” There are three general categories: commodity, support, and mission.

CIOs have been directed to focus on commodity IT services first. This includes things like acquisition and identity/access management. Appian has government solution frameworks already available in both these areas (and others as well) that accelerate solution deployment while allowing easy configuration to fit the unique needs of individual agencies.

Even in the absence of pre-built frameworks, Appian offers a far-superior approach to that of packaged applications in establishing cross-agency services. For starters, Appian offers secure, fully functional deployment in the cloud (with easy migration on premise as needed), which is a key enabler of effective service sharing. In addition, Appian’s “configure, don’t code” approach gives agencies much greater flexibility in adapting the software as their needs evolve over time. For more on this, read our “Don’t License Another Software Application Until You Read This!” white paper.

Federal CIOs are required to act quickly on the IT Shared Services Strategy. By the end of August, each agency must submit an enterprise roadmap showing their plan to consolidate commodity IT services. As they start looking at this closely, the challenges associated with supporting multiple customers for the same service will emerge. Commercial shared services organizations and business process outsourcing companies have already encountered this in spades. Read “The Five Characteristics of Highly Successful BPM Deployments in Shared Services and BPO” for some proven best practices.

It’s always interesting to reflect on how childhood lessons like “learn to share” continue to ripple through our adult and professional lives. Now if only BPM could automate the “clean up your room” process…

-Ben Farrell, Director, Corporate Communications

The Business Process Management (BPM) market is also going through an evolution. The idea behind an intelligent BPM Suite (iBPMS) is that the BPMS as we know it needs to evolve and incorporate modern technologies to meet skyrocketing data consumption needs and an increasingly global, mobile, and tech savvy workforce.

In Gartner’s words, iBPM Suites “enable leading organizations to make their business operations more intelligent by integrating analytics, social, and mobile technologies into orchestrated processes” (Source: BPM Suites Evolve into Intelligent BPM Suites). Jim Sinur, Research VP at Gartner, has been advocating the idea of Intelligent Business Operations supported by iBPMS on his blog, as well as in a recent Gartner BPM Summit session in Baltimore.

According to the same report from Gartner, the key technology differentiators that make a BPMS more intelligent are:

• Social: provide context and meaning on an action by including additional external data sources to process data. Allow more ad-hoc interactions and discovery between knowledge workers.
• Mobile: support multiple mobile devices and enable workers on the go to remain productive, responsive, and informed wherever they are.
• Analytics: extend Business Activity Monitor (BAM), Business Event support, and reports for more responsive, dynamic “active analytics” and “on-demand analytics” for predictive analysis and process optimization.

Appian has been a leader in innovating and incorporating these intelligent features into the Appian BPM Suite for years now. Many Appian customers and their end-users have embraced these modern features and enjoyed the benefits of having an intuitive, social user interface, mobile access, and advanced analytics that help them keep a pulse on the organization. Read more about some of these customers who were part of the Mobile, Cloud, and Social BPM panel moderated by Gartner’s Daryl Plummer at Appian World 2012.

If you would like learn how to leverage BPM, cloud technology, social collaboration and mobility to drive market success, join us for a free webinar on “Modern BPM for Process Innovation” on Thursday, May 17, from noon to 1 PM ET.

Cindy Cheng, Director, Product Marketing

As we adapt how we live, work, and play in the mobile and social age, Business Process Management (BPM) systems should also evolve with consumer, market, and technology trends. As the leading innovator in social, mobile, and cloud BPM, Appian has many customers in production utilizing all or some aspects of these modern technologies.

The CME Group, for example, is the world’s leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace for risk management with $3.2 billion in revenue last year. The company has been using Appian BPM Suite for 2 years now and shared their story at the Gartner BPM Summit.

For a start, CME sees and uses BPM as a business enablement platform across various functions. In the brief two years since the company embarked on the BPM journey, the team has deployed five processes across different business functions. Here are the automated business processes using Appian BPM Suite at the CME Group:

• New Product Introduction in Product Management
• On-Boarding in Resource Lifecycle Management
• Co-Location Services for Customer Support Experience
• Front Door in Product Portfolio Management
• IT Requests in IT Service Management

The one underlying theme across these processes is continuous improvement for rapid process deployment and organizational success. The small team is able to quickly design, execute, manage, and monitor these processes to show results, deliver value to internal users as well as external customers, and demonstrate benefits and ROI to the management team to get traction and budget for other projects.

John Verburght and Brian Toba from CME provided more detail on two processes during the session, which they also shared at Appian World 2012 last week. Click here to read more about their New Product Introduction and Co-Location Services.

The session also included an overview of Appian’s industry leading social, mobile, and cloud BPM capabilities. In addition, attendees learned more about the features and benefits of the integrated suite, followed by a slick live demo of the Appian BPM Suite and social user interface straight from an iPad. Here are some key points on each differentiator:

Cloud BPM:

• Cloud deployment option for rapid start-up, scalability, no manual maintenance, and free 30-day trial
• High security with extensive data privacy control, numerous certifications, and reliability with 99.5% uptime guarantee
• 100% web-based interface and scalable architecture for quickly developing, executing, managing and optimizing BPM applications

Mobile BPM:

• Native mobile BPM application supporting all major platforms on Apple iOS for iPhones and iPads, Google Android, and RIM Blackberry
• Capture rich media content so users may upload voice notes, photos, and images as part of the supporting content for related process in context
• No coding or conversion through a mobile application gateway: BPM apps built on Appian become instantly available on mobile devices with one click

Social BPM:

• Modern, intuitive social interface for team collaboration and action
• Continuous, integrated enterprise social activity stream that shows meaningful insights, tasks, and actions to end-users that are contextual to the process
• Generate real-time events from users or from systems, such as from SalesForce.com, SAP, PeopleSoft, or other legacy systems

As a software company with strong professional services background, Appian provides excellent customer experience to three million end-users  – more than any other BPM vendor. Appian customers agree: user satisfaction is at 95%. They also actively participate in and contribute to a vibrant and collaborative community, described in a recent blog.

Lastly, here are some compelling business results from implementing BPMS using Appian:

• Operational Efficiency: US Army has over 100 BPM applications with $500 million annual savings
• Service Management: UPS has more than 10 BPM apps with 1,500 users, and more than $28M Return on Investments (ROI)
• Process Agility and Visibility: Nokia Siemens Network enjoys a  €12 million euro annual productivity savings

Read about other Appian customer success stories. Hope to hear your success story at Gartner BPM Summit 2013!

- Cindy Cheng, Director, Product Marketing

Most people understand and agree that processes can be messy, hidden, chaotic, and unpredictable. Bradley asserts that some of the most important processes within an organization may not be structured and linear. So rather than trying to tame these ad hoc and unstructured processes, why not embrace and leverage social media, tap into the power of people to help discover, nurture, and improve business processes?

The idea of social process is to enable organizations with mass collaboration for performance transformation. According to Bradley, the six mass collaboration behaviors and opportunities for process improvements are:

1. Collective intelligence: crowd-source to gather ideas for process improvement, innovation, and solution.
2. Expertise location: identify knowledge experts and promote best practices from your people, which can be your employees, customers, partners, and prospects.
3. Interest cultivation: bridge interests between participants so it’s a win-win for everyone involved in the social process.
4. Relationship leverage: leverage the one-to-many massive reach and influence of social media, while maintaining an open channel for communication and collaboration.
5. Flash coordination: include people and social process as part of the scalable sense and respond system in a peer-to-peer network structure that can detect events and take actions faster than with a top-down approach.
6. Emergent structures: think outside of the traditional organizational structure and include other constituents to contribute to your process.

As the leader and innovator in Social BPM, Appian understands the importance of leveraging the power of the people and social media for process improvement and organizational success. The Appian Social BPM user interface, for example, extends visibility and participation of business processes across the enterprise. It combines real-time collaboration, filtered views of key business events, and direct action into a single intuitive interface. The social user interface is being used internally within Appian across all functions from technology, recruiting, professional services, sales, to marketing. New positions get posted so employees can refer candidates; sales opportunities and wins are announced to encourage insights and celebrate success; product questions get posted and answered within minutes.

Similarly, the Appian Forum for customers, partners, and employees foster a community that’s collaborative, dynamic, and valuable to members and their organizations. It’s a social technology platform that cultivates and nurtures mass collaboration behaviors by collecting intelligence within the community, allowing experts to emerge and contribute, meeting interests of members, leveraging relationships, allowing flash coordination to problem-solve, and providing a new structure to collaborate.

Bringing social media to the enterprise is still a fairly new concept that many organizations are just starting to understand, evaluate, and perhaps embrace. Adding the business process improvement layer to facilitate massive collaboration and to extract intelligence from social interactions will undoubtedly add to the complexity.

However, when it’s done right, it will add business value and drive organizational success as a key differentiator in this increasingly global and flat world. According to Bradley and other Gartner analysts, it’s also the future of how we work and collaborate across teams, geographies, and organizations. Click here to read more about Social BPM at Appian and how our customers are incorporating social collaboration into their core processes for business transformation.

- Cindy Cheng, Director, Product Marketing

The particular conference presentation highlight for me was Richard Ginman’s presentation on Defense Procurement and Acquisition Policy (DPAP) Initiatives and Efficiencies Priorities. I was already a big fan of DPAP given their recent efforts on the Procurement Data Standard (PDS) and the DoD Clause Logic service. Hearing Mr. Ginman speak just solidified my view that DPAP really understands the problems facing acquisition and is providing excellent guidance, support, and services to the DoD acquisition community.

Given the impending retirement of the Standard Procurement System (SPS), it wasn’t too surprising to hear Mr. Ginman talk about contract writing systems for a good portion of his presentation. He clearly articulated his position on SPS, calling a single contract writing system is “unworkable.” The example he provided was using your smart phone to pull down every single app available when you really only need some to do your job. He went on to explain that while there are certainly many common processes between acquisition groups, there are also many unique functions that groups perform depending on the type of acquisition work they’re doing. Mr. Ginman is less concerned about how many contract    writing systems there are, but rather about Data Standards, Internal Controls, Internal Validation, and Clause Logic.

Mr. Ginman’s views on contract writing systems match what Appian has been hearing from so many of the DoD acquisition shops we’ve been working with over the past several years. DoD contracting professionals are tired of trying to fit their processes into SPS and other rigid acquisition products they’ve been forced to use. So many times they’ve been told their contracting needs are not unique and they must conform to one system for the sake of    standardization.  But what needs to be standardized is the data, not necessarily all of the processes. DPAP realizes this and created the Procurement Data Standard (PDS) for that very reason.

Appian fully embraces the message of data standardization combined with process flexibility. Our Acquisition Business Management solution natively consumes the PDS structure and stores data in PDS format for easy reporting and sharing across government acquisition systems. And since ABM is built on Appian’s powerful Business Process Management (BPM) suite, we provide unparalleled process flexibility along with process audit, control, and validation. We understand that not all acquisitions are the same and not everyone needs to follow the exact same processes. ABM allows different groups to have different process flows while still collecting and maintaining standard data.  While some traditional acquisition products claim to have such flexibility, the simple fact is an Appian BPM based approach allows us to configure the solution to specific contracting needs in much less time and at far less expense than traditional procurement applications.

The next few years will be an exciting time for DoD acquisition systems. DPAP has laid the ground work for data standardization and paved the way for flexible solutions in the post SPS era. No one wants to see the same SPS mistakes made again by using a similar software approach under a new name. If you didn’t get a chance to see us at the eBusiness conference, we would welcome the opportunity to come speak with you and show you our solution.

-Ben Allen, Appian Professional Services

• Transforming the customer experience with mobile and operational processes
• Embracing and anticipating chaos with dynamic case management
• Combining and applying the process context to big data to drive transformation
• Leveraging cloud to accelerate application delivery and minimize risks

Clay Richardson from Forrester at Appian World 2012

Cloud computing, in particular, plays a key role in accelerating the deployment of enterprise applications and delivering faster time to value to the business. More and more customers are going to the cloud and choosing the Software-as-a-Service model for flexibility, scalability, cost effectiveness, and deployment speed. Yankee Group has found that 41 percent of large enterprises with more than 10,000 employees already deployed or were considering deploying a cloud platform within the next 12 months in 2011, compared to just 32 percent in 2010 (Source).

This number is consistent with Appian’s 2011 results, where Appian Cloud BPM represented 37 percent of total customer license orders that year. Here are a few Appian customers who chose cloud to deploy their enterprise applications:

• European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) implemented four BPM projects using Appian. While the earlier projects were on-premise, EBRD opted for private cloud deployments for more recent implementations due to lower costs, faster deployment speed, easier to maintain, and greater flexibility. Read more about EBRD’s BPM projects.
• Manulife Financial deployed four distinct cloud instances to automate marketing services in Canada with social and mobile features from Appian BPM. The customer indicated that cloud computing is an enabler for BPM success, which made it easier for corporate and contract workers to collaborate and participate in marketing processes. Speed to market and less dependency on IT resources were other sited reasons for cloud adoption. Learn more about Manulife and the Mobile, Cloud, and Social BPM panel at Appian World.
• IBENOX, an Appian partner, implmented an intelligent and event-driven BPM product application in the cloud that’s integrated with geo-location technology for an agricultural manufacturing client. The solution includes weather forecasts, field-based sensory and monitor devices to gather data, trigger business rules as events occur, and dynamically adjust rates and schedules accordingly to minimize production waste and maximize effectiveness. See how IBENOX is using BPM and location intelligence.

Still not sure about putting your valuable business processes and data in the cloud? Appian partners with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to power our cloud infrastructure. As the pioneer and leader in cloud computing, AWS delivers a highly reliable, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure platform to hundreds of thousands of customers in 190 countries. The AWS Deputy Chief Information Security Officer, CJ Moses, provided an overview of the different levels of security, data privacy control, and extensive certifications awarded to AWS at Appian World 2012. Visit the AWS Security and Compliance Center to learn more.

Learn more about Appian Cloud and the benefits to your organization, watch a product video, and request a trial today.

- Cindy Cheng, Director, Product Marketing

Digital transformation is dissolving organizational and industry structures. More and more, value comes from what you know rather than what you own. In 1975, around 17% of the market value of the S&P 500 was attributed to “intangible assets”; by 2005 this had risen to 80%.

Adaptability in work and in software is vital. The prescriptive method was once the only game in town – but now we can do better. Supporting knowledge work needs to move past prescribed process. When making a widget, we can specify what quality looks like. Delivering quality means executing the same detailed plan repeatedly. When handling a customer complaint, the definition of quality completely changes. “Quality” is now a complex tradeoff between effort/cost and market strategy, and delivering quality possibly means doing something different every time. Ward-Dutton makes the point that in knowledge work, exceptions are the rule! Processes are not the center of gravity.

Ward-Dutton introduced the concept of Adaptive Case Management (ACM). “ACM provides a support environment for the optimal performance of knowledge work cases in line with stated goals, together with management tools that enable analysis-based improvement of work effectiveness.

In an ACM environment work is not carried out according to prescribed process definitions; instead it’s guided by teams of case workers working towards a clear goal, leveraging codified patterns of practice, and complying with rules that specify key business constraints”.

According to Ward-Dutton, mobile & social supercharge ACM’s value. Social technology breaks down barriers to connecting work participants with each other. It provides an immediate, compact engagement model for wider stakeholder groups, and allows collaborative participation on case work in context. Mobile technology breaks down barriers to connecting work participants with tasks & information. It increases the accessibility of work management, and the visibility of performance.

Customer experience management is the “hot zone.” It’s imperative to success for a number of reasons: it’s easier to do business with existing customers than get new ones; competitiveness based on price/features is increasingly unsustainable; and good and bad experiences are easier to amplify than ever. Managing the customer experience goes beyond just quality and efficiency. Customers don’t always behave in rational, predictable ways, and responsiveness is crucial to their judgement of their experience. True customer-first thinking means changing your operational posture. Instead of engineering out exceptions, embrace them.

Getting to Adaptive Case Management
Ward-Dutton presented a series of recommendations for making ACM work in practice:

• Shape the work experience using definitions of Goals, Tools, Rules
• Leverage social & mobile technologies to maximize opportunities to marshal resources / resolve cases at the right time, with the right context
• Configure the work support system to audit, report on performance at the case level
• People drive knowledge work; those people should drive change and process improvement, too – focus on facilitation
• Facilitate regular analysis / optimization exercises to uncover opportunities to improve Tools and Rules

Ward-Dutton presented a compelling case for making the shift to adaptive case management. Will it become part of your business strategy?