30 Published by the IEEE Computer Society 1089-7801/13/$31.00 © 2013 IEEE IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING
Dynamic Collective Work
Casebook: A Cloud-Based
System of Engagement for
Case Management
Hamid R. Motahari-
Nezhad, Susan Spence,
Claudio Bartolini,
Sven Graupner,
Charles Bess,
Marianne Hickey,
Parag Joshi,
Roberto Mirizzi,
Kivanc Ozonat,
and Maher Rahmouni
Hewlett-Packard Labs
Casebook embraces social and collaboration technology, analytics, and
intelligence to advance the state of the art in case management from systems
of record to a system of engagement for knowledge workers. It addresses
complex, inef fcient work practices, information loss during hand offs between
teams, and failure to learn from previous case experience. Intelligent agents
help people adapt to changing work practices by tracking process evolution
and providing updates and recommendations. Social collaboration surrounding
cases integrates communication with information and supports collaborative
roadmapping to enable people to work as they collaborate, thus accelerating
how quickly and accurately they handle cases.
I
n case management, people with dif-
ferent areas of expertise work together
to handle a case.
1
Such cases cover
a wide range of application domains,
including healthcare, insurance claims
processing, product warranty claims, IT
management, the legal domain, or sales
pursuit management.
1,2
Knowledge work-
ers commonly form global virtual teams
that work collaboratively to manage
these cases, which requires knowledge-
intensive human judgment and decision
making. Although advances in collabora-
tion and communication technology have
facilitated workers’ interaction, the main
management burden is still on knowl-
edge workers because collaboration and
communication tools are unaware of work
context. Recently, tool vendors in busi-
ness process (BPM), enterprise content,
and customer relationship management
have tailored their solutions to ft specifc
case-management domains,
2–4
but the
new push toward adaptive case manage-
ment aims to bring fexibility, adaptabil-
ity, and responsiveness to the practice (see
the “Related Work in Case Management”
sidebar for more on such research).
1
The state of the art in case-manage-
ment technology today is represented by
traditional enterprise-resource-planning
(ERP)-like systems of record that rely
on people maintaining consistent infor-
mation, using disparate applications,
and manually tracking information
related to a case across different systems.