Productivity Tools – CaseWise

A couple of years ago a former colleague introduced me to a product called CaseWise CorporatCasewisee Modeller.   She was using it to capture process flows, mapping them to business systems and employee roles and then using these models for what-if scenarios as well as in support of system implementations.

I was blown away by many of the added value features that enabled this tool to be a big productivity gainer.  Over the weekend at a family Christmas Party I was reminded by the value and more importantly how it makes an organization more productive.

Just at the outset any tool that helps an organization map people, process and technology is amazing.  Now make it dynamic.  Not to beat up Visio and Word to great tools, they are not dynamic tools.

By leveraging this tool Kathy and her team could:

  • provide a clear view across the captured processes by any change in the process, people or technology
  • it could be published in many formats with an underlying SQL or Oracle database.  Meaning for geographically dispersed teams, you could publish the document to a web page during the process capture and then in the roll out phase as documentation
  • deliver repeatable process models and platform, leveraging the internal workings of the tools for templates and objects.

I was always amazed at why more organizations didn’t bite on this more.  I finally realized in my conversation on the weekend that it was that productivity improvement of this type is not easily quantifiable.  Almost all organizations have a license of Visio and some word processing tool – CaseWise is not cheap.  So how do clients realize the value?  This where it is hard.  Can the client get the job done faster?  Most likely if done properly with trained resources, but then again extra cost over visio and word.  The real value is the long term usability of the end result.  Just like creating scorecards and dashboards in business reporting, this is not a one time exercise, but it allows for easy repeatable use.

I am sure I have missed some of this, but Kathy I think I am finally starting to get it.

  1. mip Reply

    Good post Steve. I thought I’d offer an added bit of info as it relates to when you say that Casewise isn’t cheap. If you’re a small business that can’t afford something like Casewise there are open source options.
    A good free open source alternative is from JBoss and its called jbPM (you can find it at http://www.jboss.com/products/jbpm). It’s not as robust as Casewise but I’ve found it very useful.

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