ASAS 2014 - Standards battle in daily practises

1. Standards Battle in Daily
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera
Practice
BPMN and Case Management
Thijs Petter, Hidera

2. Agenda
• Short background on software development
• Experiences with Case Management
• What is CMMN
• Background
• Concepts of CMMN
• Modeling constructs
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

3. Background of Software
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera
Development
Focus: Business Applications

4. Software Development for Business Applications
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

5. Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera
Challenges
After development

6. Challenge 1: Upgrading the standard package
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

7. Challenge 2: Integrating the standard package
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

8. So, what did we (the ICT industry) do?
• Challenges
• Integration with the existing customer application landscape
• Customization & configuration vs. new releases
• Application integration
• Service orientation – SOA, ESB
• Open standards – XML, Web Services, HTTP, Rest, etc.
• Application customization through “configuring models”
• Focus on business rules and processes (and more …)
• BPMN emerged as de facto standard for process automation
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

9. Typical Product Stack
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

10. BPMN Strengths & Challenges
• Flowchart is a widely adopted abstraction
• BPM + SOA makes a great case for application integration
• Composite applications
• Flowchart is pro-active, procedural, predefined
• Order of activity is fixed up front
• Unclear relationship with the “file at hand”
• Not well suited for application development (more for integration)
• Case Management as an emergent standard for process automation
• Knowledge worker can choose the “plan” at runtime (rather than analyst coding it)
• Reactive, event-driven rather than procedural
• Focused on the “case” to handle (more object/file oriented than task oriented)
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

11. Practical Experiences
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera
With Cordys Case Management

12. Cordys Case Management at CIZ
• Assignment
• Validate eligibility for Care Under the AWBZ
• Annual AWBZ Expenditure 28,5 Billion Euros
• Challenges
• Replace primary process system (1500 internal, 20.000 external users)
• Need for turn-key migration
• Tightly integrated in Healthcare Chain
• BPM based project failed
• Simple requirements ok, more complex requirements too difficult
• New system architecture based on Case Management
• Single top-level case model automates entire system (>1 Million cases per year)
• Close interaction with business owners in model development
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

13. Standardization
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

14. Case Management Standardization: CMMN
• Case Management standardization
• IBM, Cordys, Oracle, and quite a few others
• Spec released May 5th, 2014
• Case Management Model & Notation – CMMN
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

15. Spec example: Claims Management
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

16. My first CMMN model
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

17. Education Submit & Review
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

18. Initial “Designer”
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

19. CMMN Concepts
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

20. CMMN Pillars
• Runtime Planning
• Constraining choices instead of prescribing
• Guard / Stage / Milestone
• Declarative model
• Including description of entities
• Offering structure to ECA style rules
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

21. Design Time vs. Run Time Planning
• Business analysts responsible for design time
• Planned/pre-defined tasks and optional (“discretionary”) tasks
• Case workers responsible for run time
• Perform planned tasks, add optional tasks
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

22. CMMN Modeling Constructs
• Case File
• Explicit description of case information structure
• Case File can generate “change events”
• Case Plan
• Workflow-like description of the tasks etc.
• Reacts to events in the case file and in the case plan
• Case Roles
• Enable authorization within the case plan
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

23. CMMN Modeling Constructs – The Case Plan
• Case Plan consists of
• Plan Items
• Sentries
• Plan Item
• Has a type definition (Task, Stage, Milestone, Event)
• Properties “Repeatable” and “Required”
• Has a lifecycle, determined by States and Transitions
• Introduced to enable patterns of definitions
• E.g. re-use a Task or a Stage in different places in the process
• Sentry
• Event + Condition under which a Plan Item starts or stops
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

24. Plan Item Types: Task, Stage, Milestone, Event
• Task
• Single unit of work
• Human Task, Case Task, Process Task
• Blocking or non-blocking
• Stage
• Grouping & nesting of plan items
• Milestone
• A goal that can be reached; can be used to track progress of the case
• Event
• Enable “listening” to Time and custom User events
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

25. Plan Item Lifecycle – dependent on type
Task & Stage lifecycle
Note: Stage propagates transitions
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera
Milestone & Event lifecycle

26. Sentry
• Plan Item lifecycle is influenced through Sentries
Entry criterion
Task.Start
• Sentry activation (“sentry is satisfied”)
• After a transition on plan items or case file items in the case (“On Part”)
• E.g. Order.Create, Document.Update, Review.Complete, MailTask.Fault,
EersteInleverDatum.Occur
• Additionally a condition (“If Part”)
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera
Exit criterion
Task.Exit

27. Sentry Examples
Task A
!
Task B
!
Task A
!
Task B
!
Task C
!
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera
Task A
!
Task B
!
Task C
!
Milestone A
Task A
!
Task A
!

28. Discretionary Items (“Optional tasks”)
• Discretionary Item is a kind of a Plan Item
• Decision to add this to the plan cannot be made at design time
• Case Worker decides to add it to the Case Plan
• Case contains a list of discretionary items
DT1
Task A
• Structured through planning tables at the level of Stage or HumanTask
• Custom filtering through Applicability Rule
• Determines whether the item is “currently” applicable
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera
!
Stage A
!
!
Discretionary
Task 1
!
Discretionary
Task 2
!

29. All Decorators
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera
Planning Table
Exit Criterion
Repeatable
Manual Activation
Expandable
Auto
Completion
Required
Entry
Criterion

30. Concluding remarks
• CMMN is complementary to BPMN
• Graphical notation needs attention
• But let’s first build up some experience
• CMMN is a new standard
• Vendor adoption slowly taking shape
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera

31. Thank you & questions
Case Management – Thijs Petter, Hidera
Contact details
Thijs Petter
tpetter@hidera.nl
nl.linkedin.com/in/thijspetter