Case Management -- What’s in a Name?

For people in the fields of law enforcement, legal or social work, the word “case” is in common use, and it’s natural to speak of managing a case. Even for people outside of those fields, there is a good understanding of what is meant by “Case Management”. Now the term Case Management is being used in a stretch role as a label for an information technology offering.

In its new mission, Case Management refers to a next stage in the evolution of offerings known previously by workflow, business process management(BPM), and business process automation(BPA). Case Management offerings integrate the workflow-BPM-BPA heritage with an agnostic presentation of structured and unstructured information. Elements from offerings known as Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management are sometimes included in Case Management.

History has no shortage of information technology labels that produced more confusion than communication. As old as it is, and in spite of significant resources having been expended, the term Knowledge Management can still ignite pointless debates about its meaning. Although there’s much less at stake, I have even recently continued to see twitter dialog questioning the significance of the term Business Process Automation versus Business Process Management. (In my mind, no significance worth discussing.)

I spoke with Tom Davenport about Case Management, and we agreed that there is a problem reconciling the common usage of Case Management in law enforcement, legal, and social work with the new use to refer to an information technology offering. We concluded that although it’s not perfect, Case Management is better than other available terms to represent the new field of information technology.

Case Management has something going for it. With early returns in, people who need or want do make the cognitive leap from the common usage to the information technology meaning of Case Management. They can make the leap in a matter of minutes without a lot of hand holding or debate. That’s powerful. In terms of communication, that’s what will make Case Management a communication success.

We Were Born Knowing How to Manage Inventory, but Can We Remember Now?

I can barely remember the first time I heard of an inventory clearance sales event and learned about the idea of “taking inventory”. Like most children who have learned the concept of subtraction, I was surprised. I wondered why a record of inventory on hand wasn’t maintained continuously, with a subtraction being made each time a product was sold. Later I understood that doing a subtraction operation for each item sold would be more costly and cumbersome, even for small businesses, than doing the periodic inventory. No business owner wants to keep a customer waiting so that a record of inventory can be updated.

It was a marvel and I told my children to observe carefully when several years ago on a vacation to remote parts of Maine we visited a grocery store with a cashier inspecting each item for a price tag and entering the price for the item into the cash register. Our check-out in that store would have been much more time consuming and costly if that cashier had to make some separate note or update inventory for each price she entered into the cash register. I hadn’t seen a check-out like that for years and I assume I will never see one again.

Accounting practices, information systems, company policies, tax laws, and habit have grown up around periodic inventory. Today, in-store check-out is all barcode scanning and increasingly self-service barcode scanning. An electronic transaction is captured without manual effort. On-line “check-out” is also free of the constraints that gave rise to periodic inventories. Updating inventory for each item sold need not take any manual effort or deprive the customer of any attention.

Periodic inventory was the best economic alternative at the time it was developed, because updating inventory as a part of each sales transaction was too costly. Today, it is the periodic inventory that is costly and inefficient relative to the potential for using point of sale data to update perpetually. Although it is hard to imagine life without periodic inventory, we need to try, because the original reasons for periodic inventory no longer exist.

I Want More from EPC Search

If RFID does only one thing, it must detect the Electronic Product Codes (EPCs) associated with items. The ability to detect EPCs enables the creation of a time and place log which delivers benefits related to logistics, inventory management, quality, and authentication. These benefits are immense and are reliably delivered by currently available products, but I want more.

The EPC should unlock more than just an item’s logistical history. If I know the EPC of a garment that I own, I want to know care instructions and where I can buy another garment like it. If I am considering the purchase of a consumer electronic, I want easy access to detailed specifications and instructions. If my neighbor has purchased a handbag second hand, she wants to know whether it’s genuine Gucci. If I see a poster for a movie, I want to read the tag on the poster and view the trailer on my mobile device.

Here are some more general statements of the information I want relative to an EPC. I want to...
- search for information about EPCs as easily as I search the web for key words
- get a result set of rich information about any type of item
- access information about a specific item
- avoid the labor and mistakes of typing in a long number
- be able to perform my search from my mobile device or any computer

International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs) that are used to identify books provide an example of what can be achieved. Using just an ISBN number as a Google search term on my computer or mobile device returns purchase opportunities, summaries, author information, and more. ISBN searching has reached an admirable state of maturity. One drawback is that because most people including myself don’t have a barcode reader, typing the ISBN number is manually intensive and error-prone. A second drawback is that there is no item-specific identification, so I can’t determine whether a specific book is a copy my brother loaned me or a copy I bought myself.

The ISBN standard was published by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1970. Since UPCs first went into production use only 4 years later in 1974, it’s surprising that searching for information about UPCs is considerably less mature. Searching for information about a UPC using Google is fruitless. Instead, various specialized and competing search facilities (e.g., http://www.singleupc.com/, http://www.upcdatabase.com/, http://upcdata.info/) provide diverging results. Even using the specialized UPC search facilities, results are limited, consisting of a small number of highly structured fields such as description, size/weight, issuing country, and last modified date.

The EPC 96-bit format achieved a level of stability in June 2008 when "EPCglobal Tag Data Standards Version 1.4" was ratified by GS1. Predictably, freely available search facilities for EPC lag those for ISBN and UPC, but standards efforts related to Object Naming Service, EPC Information Services, and EPC Discovery Services provide a foundation for emergence of EPC search that can fulfill the wants above. With these standards efforts and the experience of ISBN and UPC, the best of searching for things lies ahead.