Mastering the Unpredictable: How Adaptive Case Management Will Revolutionize the Way That Knowledge Workers Get Things Done

Supporting the dynamic nature of both constantly shifting business environments and the self-directed, nonrepeatable nature of knowledge-worker processes requires the ability to assemble structured and unstructured processes from basic predefined business entities, content, social interactions, and business rules. It requires capturing actionable i

Thomas Davenport (2005) in his book Thinking for a Living defines knowledge workers: “Knowledge workers have high degrees of expertise, education, or experience, and the primary purpose of their jobs involves the creation, distribution, or application of knowledge.” The opposite of knowledge work might be called “routine work.” Routine work is well

the need for knowledge-worker support systems that are not programmed by specialists, as they have been in the past, but instead can be dynamically modified by ordinary users in the course of their work.

You should not think of knowledge work as necessarily being the work of librarians who collect and organize information. It is instead about work that is not routine work, for which knowledge of the specifics of the situation is required to determine the pattern of the work.

maintaining of data surrounding the process to demonstrate how objectives were realized and decisions were made.

scripting the work process in advance offers little benefit for increasing knowledge-worker productivity, much less the ability to adapt to changes in the business environment.

This is the orientation that frames our definition of ACM used throughout this book: Systems that are able to support decision making and data capture while providing the freedom for knowledge workers to apply their own understanding and subject matter expertise to respond to unique or changing circumstances within the business environment. In many

“Knowledge is different from all other resources. It makes itself constantly obsolete, so that today’s advanced knowledge is tomorrow’s ignorance.

business processes with a high percentage of unstructured or ad hoc work.